A STUDY OF SHELLEY'S DRAMA 
THE CENCI 



PR 5408 

B3 
1908 
Copy 1 



ERNEST SUTHERLAND BATES 




Neto ¥orft 

THE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 

1908 

All rights reserved 



Honog'&flfl 



\ 



COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY STUDIES IN ENGLISH 
Series II. Vol. Ill, No. 1. 



A STUDY OF SHELLEY'S CENCI 



A STUDY OF SHELLEY'S DRAMA 
THE CENCI 



ERNEST SUTHERLAND BATES 




Neto York 

THE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 

1908 

All rights reserved 



\ l \ 



^ 



■tftfi 



Library of co 

j 1 wo Copies rteca ivj*j 

I FEB 29 i 908 

l-iC3»4- AXc. No, 



Copyright, 1908 
By The Columbia University Press 

Printed from type February. 1908 



PRESS OF 

THE NEW ERA PRINTING COMPANY 

LANCASTER. PA 



The Monograph has been approved by the De- 
partment of English in Columbia University as a 
contribution to knowledge worthy of publication. 
A. H. THORNDIKE, 

Secretary. 



PREFACE 

There is probably no author in the whole range of English 
literature about whose work more contradictory and unsatis- 
factory judgments have been expressed than those which have 
appeared in the case of Shelley. Criticism, both favorable and 
unfavorable, has tended constantly to be extravagant and 
polemical, dealing in superlatives and no positives. The quality 
of his style is such as either greatly to attract or greatly to 
repel ; it leaves none indifferent. For this reason, objective, 
non-partisan studies of his poetry as a whole, or of individual 
poems, are very few. Furthermore, there has been all too 
much impressionism in the criticism which he has received, and 
all too little attention to details. 

" The Cenci " offers particular attractions for the kind of 
close intensive study which is now needed in the case of all 
Shelley's poems. Its style shows so little of its author's 
usual radiant imagery that one can approach it in a mood of 
some calmness ; it has hitherto received even less adequate crit- 
ical attention than any other of the poet's major works ; and 
its significance for our knowledge of Shelley's total artistic 
power is, owing to its dramatic form, very great. For these 
reasons " The Cenci " was selected as the subject of the present 
monograph. I shall be well satisfied if the latter may prove 
in its limited degree some slight aid to a more impartial appre- 
ciation than has yet been given to one whose merits I could 
wish to see admired with less of idolatry, and whose defects 
certainly ought to be censured with less of prejudice, than has 
hitherto usually been the case. 

My great indebtedness to the various members of the English 
department at Columbia University for constant criticism, sug- 
gestion, and encouragement will be understood by all who have 
ever worked with them : it would be vain to attempt in a few 
lines to indicate the multifarious nature of this indebtedness. 
But I cannot refrain from particularizing the especial aid ren- 
vii 



dered by Professor W. P. Trent, to whom the inception of the 
work was largely due, and by Professor Brander Matthews 
and Professor Thorndike, whose suggestions upon the dramatic 
aspects of the subject have been invaluable ; also, my study of 
Shelley's style owes much to the judicious advice of Dr. G. P. 
Krapp ; and in many minor points throughout the dissertation 
I have profited from the friendly counsel of Dr. W. W. 
Lawrence. I wish also to express my thanks to Professor 
Richard Holbrook, of Bryn Mawr College, who generously 
placed in my hands his notes upon various Italian documents 
connected with the history of the Cenci family. 

E. S. B. 
Columbia University, 
December 14, 1907. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 

i 

Statement of Problems I 

II 
Composition and Publication of The Cenci 3 

III 
Literary Criticism : 

1. Contemporary 1 1 

2. Later 19 

IV 
Production of The Cenci in 1886 26 

V 
Shelley's Cenci and the Cenci of History 31 

VI 
Dramatic Structure > 35 

VII 
Characterization 64 

VIII 
Style 81 

IX 
Final Significance 96 



I 

Statement of Problems 

"The Cenci " has long been recognized as one of Shelley's 
most important works, and by some has even been considered 
the greatest of all. Yet of definite criticism or thorough 
analysis it has received far less than " Queen Mab," " Alastor," 
" Prometheus Unbound," " Epipsychidion," or " Adonais." 
Aside from the interesting but bigoted contemporary criticism, 
and the almost equally prejudiced newspaper reviews of the 
performance by the Shelley Society in 1886, we are confined 
for our information to a single monograph dealing mainly with 
the drama's relations to its source, 1 and to scattered para- 
graphs here and there in biographies and essays. Even these 
paragraphs often seem more perfunctory than in the case of 
Shelley's other works, as if the writers had merely glanced at 
" The Cenci " en route from the more congenial fields in the 
" Prometheus " to those in the " Epipsychidion." 

For this comparative neglect of the play by Shelley students 
there are several reasons. Its subject-matter, incest, is not an 
attractive or a significant theme for the world to-day, and the 
interest of Byron and Shelley in the topic inevitably seems to 
us morbid and unhealthy. This in itself may have been suffi- 
cient to prevent many critics from making a careful exami- 
nation of the play. More important still is the fact that " The 
Cenci " is in its style less individually characteristic of the 
author than is any other of his mature works. In this regard 
one writer has asserted : " Were the tragedy now first discov- 
ered in manuscript, and did we only know that it was written 
by someone who was alive in 1819, Shelley is one of the last 
persons to whom, from the internal evidence of his other 
poems, it would be assigned." 2 Had this writer been asked 
to what other contemporary poet it would rather have been 
assigned, he might have found it difficult to reply, but his 

1 Wilhelm Wagner Shelley's 'The Cenci; Rostock 1903. 

2 George Stillman Hillard, Six Months in Italy, London 1853, "• 335~36. 

2 1 



statement is only an exaggeration, not a perversion, of the 
truth. The lyrical ecstacy and the rapturous melody, the pro- 
fuse imagery and the impassioned description, which give 
Shelley's poetry its greatest individual charm, are all moderated 
and restrained in " The Cenci " to accord with the dramatic 
purpose. The metaphysical pantheism of Shelley, which to his 
more enthusiastic followers makes his poetry a source of relig- 
ious inspiration, is hardly apparent, and the political socialism 
so prominent elsewhere is here quite absent. Under these cir- 
cumstances it is perhaps no wonder that " The Cenci " has 
received less attention than its importance and intrinsic merits 
deserve. 

Its importance consists chiefly in the light which it throws 
upon the total nature of Shelley's genius. In the first place, 
" The Cenci " is of especial interest as one of the poet's few 
attempts to handle a historical subject. The question at once 
arises, Does the treatment confirm or modify the impression, 
gained from Shelley's biography, of his general inability to 
estimate correctly the significance of past history? How far, 
if at all, does it show evidence of what we may call " historical- 
mindedness " ? In the second place, and much more to be 
emphasized, is the importance derived from the fact that " The 
Cenci " was Shelley's one completed attempt in regular drama. 
The question as to how far he succeeded in this is full of 
meaning for our estimate of his poetic power and potentiality, 
and it is one not to be answered by sweeping generalization, 
but by a detailed examination of the relation of " The Cenci " 
to the chief factors involved in dramatic composition. What 
of the structure, and of the influences which determined it? 
What of the characters, and of the reasons which led Shelley 
to treat them as he has done? What of the style, and of its 
suitability to dramatic needs? What of the meter, and of the 
means by which Shelley, master of rhythm and melody as he 
was, here obtained the metrical effects which he desired ? 
Finally, what are we to say of the play as a whole, of its rela- 
tive literary and dramatic value, and of its significance in our 
understanding of Shelley as man and as poet? These are the 
chief problems of which an attempted solution is set forth in 
the following pages. 



II 

Composition and Publication of " The Cenci " 

Shelley was probably the most rapid writer among all the 
great English poets, with the exception of Shakespeare and 
Byron. In the composition of " The Cenci " he surpassed even 
his own normal rate of speed. While the " Revolt of Islam " 
and the first three acts of " Prometheus Unbound " had occupied 
five and six months respectively, the time spent in the actual 
composition of " The Cenci " was only two months, 1 although 
its general theme, to be sure, had been in the poet's mind for a 
considerably longer period. 

Soon after Shelley's first arrival in Italy an Italian manu- 
script account of the wrongs of Beatrice Cenci, called a " Rela- 
tion of the Death of the Family of the Cenci," came tempor- 
arily into his hands at Leghorn. On May 25, 1818, 2 a little 
before their departure for the Baths of Lucca, Mrs. Shelley 
made a copy of this manuscript, and, then or later, she or 
Shelley 3 translated it into English. The poet at once perceived 
the fitness of the subject for tragedy and urged it upon his 
wife, who, however, distrusted her own powers, and declined 
the task. The mere story evidently did not have sufficient fas- 
cination for Shelley at this time to inspire his own imagination 
to the point of writing, and the subject seems to have slipped 
into the background of his consciousness until the following 

'Shelley to Peacock, Aug. 22 (?), 1819 (Peacock, Works, III. 465). 

2 Mrs. Shelley's note to The Cenci in her 1839 editions gives Rome, 
1819, as the place and time of Shelley's first acquaintance with the manu- 
script, but the contemporary evidence of her journal gives the earlier date 
(Dowden, Life of Shelley, ii. 277). 

3 The translation has been usually attributed to Shelley, but his own 
statement to Peacock is simply, " I send you a translation of the Italian 
manuscript on which my play is founded " (Shelley to Peacock, August 
22 ( ?), 1819). Robert Browning thought he remembered having heard 
somewhere that the translation was by Mrs. Shelley (Browning, Works, 
Camberwell ed., ix. 305). 

3 



spring at Rome. Here he found a universal acquaintance with 
the story, and everywhere the same interest and sympathy with 
the unfortunate heroine. This convinced him that the plot 
already possessed that inestimable dramatic advantage, com- 
mon to the Greek and some Elizabethan plays, of previous exist- 
ence in the popular consciousness as a source of tragic emotion. 

But the real inspiration for his work seems to have come 
from the supposed portrait 1 of Beatrice Cenci by Guido Reni 
in the Barberini 2 palace. At that time there was no doubt 
entertained as to the authenticity of the picture, painted, ac- 
cording to tradition, in prison the day before the execution. 
From Shelley's description in the preface to his drama it is 
easy to see how his imagination was fired : 

" The portrait of Beatrice at the Colonna Palace is admirable 
as a work of art; it was made by Guido during her confine- 
ment in prison. But it is most interesting as a just representa- 
tion of one of the loveliest specimens of the workmanship of 
Nature. There is a fixed and pale composure upon the fea- 
tures ; she seems sad and stricken down in spirit, yet the 
despair thus expressed is lightened by the patience of gentle- 
ness. Her head is bound with folds of white drapery from 
which the yellow strings of her golden hair escape and fall 
about her neck. The moulding of her face is exquisitely deli- 
cate ; the eyebrows are distinct and arched ; the lips have that 
permanent meaning of imagination and sensibility which suf- 

1 The authenticity of the picture was disproved by A. Bertolotti in his 
"Francesco Cenci e la sua famiglia " in 1879. He found that the first 
payment made to Guido Reni for painting in Rome was dated 1608, nine 
years after Beatrice's execution, and that there was no reason to believe 
that he had ever painted there before that year. Catalogues of the Bar- 
berini Palace in 1604 and 1623 made no mention of any picture of Bea- 
trice Cenci. The Edinburgh Review, in a discussion of Bertolotti's book, 
pointed out the further fact that the same head appears in other pictures 
by Guido, — in the Orsini Palace, in the Rospigliosi Palace, and in the 
chapel attached to the Church of St. Gregory {Edinburgh Review, cxlix. 
33-34)- But it is possible that the painting is by some imitator of Guido's 
style. 

2 Shelley and Mrs. Shelley both speak of the portrait as in the Colonna 
Palace, but it is at present in the Barberini, and was seen there as early 
as 1823 by Henri Beyle. There is no record of its ever having been in 
the Colonna Palace. 



fering has not repressed and which it seems as if death scarcely 
could extinguish. Her forehead is large and clear; her eyes, 
which we are told were remarkable for their vivacity, are 
swollen with weeping and lustreless, but beautifully tender and 
serene. In the whole mien there is a simplicity and dignity 
which, united with her exquisite loveliness and deep sorrow, 
are inexpressibly pathetic. Beatrice Cenci appears to have 
been one of those rare persons in whom energy and gentleness 
dwell together without destroying one another ; her nature was 
simple and profound. The crimes and miseries in which she 
was an actor and a sufferer are as the mask and the mantle 
in which circumstances clothed her for her impersonation on 
the scene of the world." 

It is worth while to compare with this description one by 
another great writer equally sensitive to the charm of the 
picture, but differing from Shelley in his interpretation. Haw- 
thorne, in the seventh chapter of " The Marble Fawn " repre- 
sents his heroine, Hilda, to have painted a copy of Guido's 
Beatrice, which he thus describes: "The picture represented 
simply a female head ; a very youthful, girlish, perfectly beau- 
tiful face, enveloped in white drapery, from beneath which 
strayed a lock or two of what seemed a rich, though hidden 
luxuriance of auburn hair. The eyes were large and brown, 
and met those of the spectator, but evidently with a strange, 
ineffectual effort to escape. There was a little redness about 
the eyes, very slightly indicated, so that you would question 
whether or no the girl had been weeping. The whole face was 
quiet ; there was no distortion or disturbance of any single 
feature ; nor was it easy to see why the expression was not 
cheerful, or why a single touch of the artist's pencil should 
not brighten it into joyousness. But, in fact, it was the very 
saddest picture ever painted or conceived ; it involved an un- 
fathomable depth of sorrow, the sense of which came to the 
observer by a sort of intuition. It was a sorrow that removed 
this beautiful girl out of the sphere of humanity, and set her 
in a far-off region, the remoteness of which — while yet her 
face is so close before us — makes us shiver as at a spectre." 

Between these two descriptions there are to be noted slight 



6 

differences of observation, in regard to the exact color of the 
hair, its arrangement, and the evidences of weeping; — but the 
radical divergence lies in the interpretation. Hawthorne notices 
chiefly the situation, and the isolation of Beatrice from normal 
human life ; Shelley feels rather the nobility of her character, 
and regards her as an example of excellence for human life. 
This view, more ideal and less true to the circumstances, was, 
as we shall see, fundamental in Shelley's handling of the 
character. 

The hold which the story had now taken upon the poet was 
increased by a visit which he and his wife paid about this time 
to the ruins of the Cenci Palace. 1 His mind was now moved 
to the point of creation, and he saw in these rather squalid 
buildings the solemn and fitting scene of tragedy. In his 
preface he describes them thus : 

" The Cenci Palace is of great extent ; and, though in part 
modernized, there yet remains a vast and gloomy pile of feudal 
architecture in the same state as during the dreadful scenes 
which are the subject of this tragedy. The Palace is situated 
in an obscure corner of Rome, near the quarter of the Jews, 
and from the upper windows you see the immense ruins of 
Mount Palatine half hidden under their profuse overgrowth 
of trees. There is a court in one part of the Palace (perhaps 
that in which Cenci built the Chapel to St. Thomas), sup- 
ported by granite columns and adorned with antique friezes 
of fine workmanship, and built up, according to the ancient 
Italian fashion, with balcony over balcony of openwork. One 
of the gates of the Palace formed of immense stones and lead- 
ing through a passage, dark and lofty and opening into gloomy 
subterranean chambers, struck me particularly." 

How these same buildings appear to the ordinary man who 
carries no unborn drama in his mind may be seen from the 
following description by one James Henry Dixon : 2 " I have 
just been visiting the principal scene of Shelley's tragedy, 
' Beatrice Cenci.' I had some little difficulty in finding the 
place ; but, at last, after walking through several narrow, tor- 

1 Dowden, Life, ii. 277. 

2 American Bibliopolist, vii. 165, June 1875. 



tuous, and dirty streets — and such are not wanting in Rome — I 
arrived at a small piazza, or square, in the Ghetto, or Jewish 
quarter, called Piazza di Cenci. In this square is the Jews' 
synagogue, with a clock and bell, and the Universita Israelitica. 
They are neat buildings, and form a pleasing contrast to the 
wretched pile which was once the residence of the noble family 
of the Cenci. In the centre of the square is a ruined fountain, 
waterless, and with a circular basin choked with mud. On the 
right hand side of the square is a large part of the palace. It 
is now divided into dwelling-houses, and let out in tenements 
to a class who have, evidently, small claim to either rank or 
station. . . . One side of the square is occupied by the Church 
of St. Thomas, which the infamous Francis Cenci is said to 
have erected as some atonement for his horrible crimes. The 
church is ruinous and disused. Like the palace, it is divided 
and let out in tenements to poor people, whose broken flower- 
pots crowded the window-sills. . . . From Shelley's descrip- 
tion, in the preface to his tragedy, I expected to find a very 
different sort of building — in fact, to encounter an Italian 
palazzo of the Middle Ages, with huge Cyclopean walls and 
Byzantine doorways and windows — a sort of Roman Udolpho. 
All this I was led to expect from the poet's talk about gloom, 
vastness, extent, etc. . . . Had Shelley not named the ' Church 
of St. Thomas,' I should have supposed that he had made some 
mistake, and had either visited another neighboring palace, or 
trusted to some erroneous description. There is not the slight- 
est resemblance between Shelley's account and the actuality." 
We learn from Mrs. Shelley's journal that by May 14, five 
weeks after the completion of " Prometheus Unbound " in its 
first form, Shelley was at work upon his new drama. 1 From 
the beginning his wife was enthusiastic in her support, and 
together the two planned the arrangement of the various 
scenes. The work was interrupted, however, in the first week 
of June by the sudden illness of their three year old son 
William. For sixty consecutive hours Shelley watched at the 
bed-side, and as a result physical illness was added to the grief 
caused by the boy's death. He was the last of the three chil- 

1 Dowden, Life, ii. 277. 



dren whom Mary had borne to Shelley, and had been especially 
dear to both. The heart-sick parents felt the scene of their 
loss to be intolerable, and left Rome forever. 

A refuge was found at Villa Valsovano, a small house which 
they rented^ about half way between Leghorn and Monte Nero. 
Here they passed the summer, and Shelley spent his days in 
writing, varied by the study of Spanish and the reading of 
Calderon under the instruction of their neighbor at Leghorn, 
Mrs. Maria Gisborne. 

The villa was cheerfully situated in the center of a small 
farm. Italian peasants worked and sang outside the windows 
during the day, while at night the adjacent hedges glowed with 
fire-flies, save when the quiet of the scene was broken by one 
of the splendid thunder storms frequent in that region. There 
was a small, glass-covered terrace at the top of the house, com- 
manding a wide view of the fertile Italian meadows and the 
near-by sea, and this was taken by Shelley as his work-room. 
The season proved exceptionally hot, and often the little room 
became so like an oven as to be intolerable to all but the poet, 
who basked in the heat of the glaring sunshine, and under its 
influence felt in some measure his health and happiness return. 
In this romantic situation the bulk of " The Cenci " was written. 
There can be no better testimony to the stern self-control which 
in this instance the poet was exerting over his fancy, than the 
fact that of all the images which the charm of his surroundings 
must have aroused in his mind, not one was allowed to creep 
into the drama. Neither the cheerfulness of the peasant's 
singing, nor the majestic terror of the thunder storms left the 
slightest echo in his work ; in all of his long poems hitherto he 
had indulged in exquisite pictures of ocean or lake ; now, with 
the Mediterranean before his very eyes, he refrained. 

By July the work was sufficiently advanced for Shelley to 
write to his friend Thomas Love Peacock, asking him if pos- 
sible to secure its presentation at Covent Garden. 1 His letter 
stated that he believed his tragedy not inferior in composition 
to any modern English play except Coleridge's " Remorse " ; 
that he had taken particular pains to adapt it to the stage ; that 

'Shelley to Peacock, July 1819 (Shelley's Works, Forman ed. viii. 112). 



9 

the leading role might even seem to have been written for the 
actress Miss O'Neil ; but that he doubted whether the subject 
of incest, however delicately handled, would be allowed pres- 
entation on the English stage. Along with this letter Shelley 
sent the translation of the Italian manuscript which had been 
made. On August 8 the play was finished, and later in the 
same month copied and corrected. 1 

Shelley desired to have his tragedy printed in order to enable 
the theatrical managers to judge of it more easily. He found 
that in Italy this would cost only about half as much as in 
England. The printer to whom he entrusted the work is not 
certainly known, but he was probably Masi of Leghorn, who 
had brought out several English books a short time before at 
more reasonable rates than those of the London houses. 2 Only 
250 copies of " The Cenci " were printed. About the middle 
of October these were sent to Shelley's English publisher, 
Oilier, in a sealed box with instructions not to open until 
further orders, Shelley being aware of the theatrical manager's 
prejudice against plays which had been already published. 
Peacock now did his duty and attempted to have the play 
brought out at Covent Garden. Mr. Harris, the manager, 
perused it and replied that instead of permitting Miss O'Neil 
to act the part of Beatrice, he could not think of letting her 
even read it. At the same time he expressed his appreciation 
of the dramatic power of the author, and said that if Shelley 
would write a tragedy on some other subject, he would willingly 
accept it. 3 

" The Cenci " may possibly have been offered also to Drury 
Lane. Shelley in a letter to Oilier mentioned this theater as 
the one which had refused the play, 4 but the statement may 
very likely have been due to his habitual carelessness. 

At all events, nothing came of the effort to have the drama 
produced, and Oilier was told to publish the 250 copies that he 
had on hand. Shelley had desired an engraving of Guido's 

1 Dowden, ii. 279. 

2 Ibid. 

3 Peacock, Works, iii. 435. 

4 Shelley to Oilier, March 13, 1820 (Shelley Memorials, p. 151). 



10 

picture for a frontispiece, but the undertaking was found to be 
too expensive. He had also intended the translation of the 
Italian manuscript to be prefixed to the play, but for some 
reason this also was not done. The drama appeared in March, 
1820, with a warm dedication to Leigh Hunt, and, like Shelley's 
other publications, with a descriptive and interpretative preface. 



Ill 

Literary Criticism 
i. Contemporary 

The first reviewer to notice the play was Leigh Hunt in a 
paragraph of the Examiner (March 19, 1820), where he hailed 
it as unquestionably " the greatest dramatic production of the 
day." A little later (April 6, 1820) he wrote personally to 
Shelley and his wife : 

" Shelley's tragedy is out and flourishing. I recently took, 
as his friend and representative, congratulations on all sides, 
upon the dedication, the preface, and the drama. Oilier, who 
thought it would not sell, had to tell Henry Hunt the other 
day, that the first edition had almost all gone off already. . . . 
What a noble book, Shelley, have you given us ! What a true, 
stately, and yet affectionate mixture of poetry, philosophy, and 
human nature, and horror, and all-redeeming sweetness of 
intention, for there is an undersong of suggestion through it 
all, that sings, as it were, after the storm is over, like a brook 
in April. But you will see what I say about it in the next 
Examiner but one. I gave a brief notice of it two or three 
weeks ago, announcing this longer one, which will just pre- 
cede, I hope, the second edition." 1 

The promised review did not appear, however, until July 19 
and 26, and then in the Indicator. Meanwhile hostile criticisms 
appeared in the Literary Gazette, 2 the Monthly Magazine, 3 the 
New Monthly Magazine, 4 and the London Magazine. 5 

The review in the Literary Gazette began as follows : " Of 
all the abominations which intellectual perversion, and poetical 

1 Leigh Hunt, Correspondence, i. 154. 

2 April 1, 1820. 

8 No. 338, p. 260, April 1820. 

4 Vol. xiii. pp. 550-553, May 1, 1820. 

6 Vol. i. pp. 546-555, May 1820. 

11 



12 

atheism, have produced in our times, this tragedy appears to 
us to be the most abominable. . . . We protest most solemnly, 
that when we reached the last page of this play, our minds 
were so impressed with its odious and infernal character that 
we could not believe it to be written by a mortal being for the 
gratification of his fellow-creatures on this earth : it seemed to 
be the production of a fiend, and calculated for the entertain- 
ment of devils in hell . . . guilt so atrocious as that which he 
paints in every one of his dramatic personages, never had 
either individual or aggregate existence. No ; the whole de- 
sign, and every part of it, is a libel upon humanity ; the con- 
ception of a brain not only distempered, but familiar with 
infamous images, and accursed contemplations. What adds to 
the shocking effect is the perpetual use of the sacred name of 
God, and incessant appeals to the Saviour of the Universe." 
The reviewer then went on to point out in each individual case 
the utter wickedness of the characters, cited the horror of the 
banquet scene as an example of the debasement of Shelley's 
intellect, and closed triumphantly with a citation of " the 
dying infidelity of that paragon of parricides," — Beatrice's 
speech, " Whatever comes my heart shall sink no more " (V. 
iv. 78-89). The only passage of quotable worth which the 
reviewer found in the whole play was Beatrice's description of 
the ravine where her father was to be murdered (III. i. 
243-265). 

The brief notice in the Monthly Magazine condescended to 
no details, but contented itself with stigmatizing the play as 
nonsense and raving, intended to inspire terror but really arous- 
ing only horror and disgust. 

The New Monthly was but slightly more favorable in tone. 
It, too, objected to the author's strange perversity of taste 
which made his tragedy a source of wonder and disgust, and 
it held that the exhibition of such crimes was radically im- 
moral, tending to destroy that unconsciousness of evil which it 
believed to be the surest safeguard. It congratulated the poet, 
indeed, on having shown the ability to leave his " cold abstrac- 
tions " and deal with actual people, but its view of the two 
leading characters was again unfriendly. " With the exception 



13 

of Cenci, who is half maniac and half fiend, his persons speak 
and act like creatures of flesh and blood, not like the problems 
of strange philosophy set in motion by galvanic art. The 
heroine, Beatrice, is, however, distinguished only from the 
multitude of her sex by her singular beauty and sufferings. 
In destroying her father she seems impelled by madness rather 
than will, and in her fate excites pity more by her situation 
than her virtues. Instead of avowing the deed, and asserting 
its justice, as would be strictly natural for one who had com- 
mitted such a crime for such a cause — she tries to avoid death 
by the meanest arts of falsehood, and encourages her accom- 
plices to endure the extremities of torture rather than implicate 
her by confession." The banquet scene in the first act the 
reviewer characterized as " a wanton piece of absurdity, which 
could have nothing but its improbability to recommend it for 
adoption." He cited, however, with literary approval the quiet 
pathos of the close, Beatrice's description of the ravine, and 
Giacomo's soliloquy on the dying flame, but ended with the 
customary criticism that Shelley's many faults were due to his 
failure to understand religious truth. 

The London Magazine found the cause of the numerous 
defects in the drama to be the fundamental immorality of the 
writer. Shelley's personal vanity, it said, led him to strive at 
all costs to be different from other men; his perverted and 
diseased character led to a fondness for rotten and wicked 
themes. Such a man as Cenci, if he ever existed, was simply 
mad, and no fit subject for tragic treatment. The wickedness 
of the Pope as here represented would have been unbelievable 
save by men of the " toleration " and " enlarged liberality " of 
Mr. Shelley and his friends. The whole work, in brief, showed 
a " radical foulness of moral complexion." Curiously enough, 
however, the reviewer found the language in which this moral 
foulness was conveyed to be " vigorous, clear, manly, . . . cor- 
rect, and simple," and he made numerous quotations for literary 
praise. 

With the fierceness of these moralistic denunciations of 
Shelley in our ears, Leigh Hunt's defense of his friend in the 
Indicator, vigorous enough actually, seems tame by compari- 



14 

son. He devoted himself to the ethical aspects of the case, 
and asserted that, " The moral of the terrible story of ' The 
Cenci,' whether told in history or poetry, is a lesson against 
the enormities arising from bad education, from long-indulged 
self-will, from the impunities of too great wealth and authority, 
and tyrannical and degrading notions of the Supreme Being." 
He attempted to refute the charge against Beatrice, by arguing 
that her denial of the crime was dictated by a horror of her 
act, so intense in character that she found it necessary to re- 
gard the event as a hideous dream, that by no possibility could 
ever really have happened (an interpretation which unfor- 
tunately has no support from any passage in the play). Hunt, 
like the rest, picked out the description of the ravine for special 
praise, and made a number of other long quotations. 

Such were the criticisms of 1820. In 1821 two more ap- 
peared : one in the Monthly Review, 1 the other in Blackwood's 
Edinburgh Magazine. 2 The former began: "As the genius 
of this writer grows on us, most heartily do we wish that we 
were able to say, his good sense and judgment grow with 
it — but, alas for the imperfections of the brightest minds, the 
reverse in this instance is the case; and the extravagance and 
wildness of Mr. Shelley's first flights yield to the present, not 
only in their own eccentric character but in other most objec- 
tionable points." The reviewer then proceeded to attack the 
bad taste shown in the choice of subject matter, and the adop- 
tion of " the exploded Wordsworthian heresy " that poetic 
language should be the language of daily life. He ascribed 
Shelley's chief faults to Doubt and Vanity. He acknowledged 
literary power in the work and quoted two passages : a portion 
of the dialogue between Beatrice and Lucretia in the second 
act, and Beatrice's lament " Whatever comes my heart shall 
sink no more " in the fifth act. 

It was left for Blackwood's to add the bitterest invectives 
to the chorus of anathemas directed against Shelley. After 
whetting his knife on the "Adonais," the reviewer, probably 
Wilson, turned to " The Cenci " in this fashion : " Bu{ Percy 

1 Vol. xciv. pp. 1 6 1-8, February 1821. 
2 Vol. x., December 1821. 



15 

Bysshe has figured as a sentimentalist before, and we can quote 
largely without putting him to the blush by praise. What 
follows illustrates his power over the language of passion. In 
the Cenci, Beatrice is condemned to die for parricide, — a situa- 
tion that, in a true poet, might awaken a noble succession of 
distressful thought. The mingling of remorse, natural affec- 
tion, woman's horror at murder, and alternate melancholy and 
fear at the prospect of the grave, in Percy Bysshe works up 
only this frigid rant ; 

' How comes this hair undone ? 
Its wandering strings must be what blind me so, 
And yet I tied it fast . . . 
The sunshine on the floor is black ! The air 
Is changed to vapours such as the dead breathe 
In charnel pits ! Pah ! I am choked ! There creeps 
A clinging, black, contaminating mist 
About me — 'tis substantial, heavy, thick ; 
I can not pluck it from me, for it glues 
My fingers and my limbs to one another, 
And eats into my sinews, and dissolves 
My flesh to a pollution, poisoning 
The subtle, pure, and inmost spirit of life ! ' 

So much for the history of ' Glue ' — and so much easier is it 
to rake together the vulgar vocabulary of rottenness and rep- 
tilism, than to paint the workings of the mind. This raving 
is such as perhaps no excess of madness ever raved, except in 
the imagination of a Cockney, determined to be as mad as 
possible and opulent in his recollections of the shambles. 

" In the same play we have a specimen of his ' art of descrip- 
tion.' He tells of a ravine — 

' And in its depth there is a mighty rock, 
Which has, from unimaginable years, 
Sustained itself with terror and with toil 
Over a gulf, and with the agony 
With which it clings seems slowly coming down ; 
Even as a wretched soul hour after hour 
Clings to the mass of life; yet, clinging, leans; 
And, leaning, makes more dark the dread abyss 
In which it fears to fall ; beneath this crag 
Huge as despair, as if in weariness, 
The melancholy mountain yawns; below,' 



16 

" And all this is done by a rock — What is to be thought of the 
terror of this novel sufferer — its toil — the agony with which so 
sensitive a personage clings to its paternal support, from unim- 
aginable years? The magnitude of this melancholy and in- 
jured monster is happily measured by its being the exact size 
of despair. Soul becomes substantial and darkens a dread 
abyss. Such are Cockney darings before 'the gods, and 
columns' that abhor mediocrity. And is it to this dreary 
nonsense that is to be attached the name of poetry? ' n 

The few contemporary writers who were enabled by ability 
or disposition to criticize Shelley's works at all fairly were, 
for the most part, embraced in his own small circle of acquaint- 
ances. Their opinions of " The Cenci," while not unanimous, 
were probably upon the whole more favorable than to any 
other of the author's works. The drama was clearly Mrs. 
Shelley's favorite among all her husband's productions, and 
she cites the last act as distinctly " the finest thing he ever 
wrote." 2 Leigh Hunt's first admiration seems only to have 
increased with time. In 1828 he wrote: 

" Mr. Shelley ought to have written nothing but dramas, 
interspersed with such lyrics as these [' The fountains mingle 
with the river' — quoted just before]. Perhaps had he lived, 
he would have done so ; for, after all, he was but young ; and 
he had friends of that opinion whom he was much inclined to 
agree with. The fragment of the tragedy of ' Charles the 
First ' makes us long for more of it. With all his republican- 
ism he would have done justice to Charles, as well as to Pym 
and Hampden. His completest production is unquestionably 
the tragedy of ' The Cenci.' The objections to the subject are, 
on the face of them, not altogether unfounded ; but they ought 

1 Accuracy was always a very unimportant canon in Blackwood's literary 
criticism. The first passage quoted does not occur, as the reviewer says 
it does, after Beatrice's condemnation, but immediately after Cenci's 
crime, when the situation is of course entirely different. And in the 
second passage although there is a certain clumsiness in Shelley's wording, 
the idea is clear enough that it is the rock and not the soul that " makes more 
dark the dread abyss. - ' But the need of understanding an author before 
ridiculing him never occurred to Blackwood's. 

1 Shelley's Works, 1839 ed. vol. ii. p. 279. 



17 

not to weigh with those who have no scruple in grappling with 
any of the subjects of our old English drama, and know how 
to think of the great ends of poetry in a liberal and masculine 
manner." 1 

And again in 1844: 

" What a pity he did not live to produce a hundred such 
[lyrics as ' The Skylark '] ; or to mingle briefer lyrics, as beau- 
tiful as Shakespere's with tragedies which Shakespere himself 
might have welcomed! for assuredly, had he lived, he would 
have been the greatest dramatic writer since the days of Eliza- 
beth, if indeed he has not abundantly proved himself such in 
his tragedy of ' The Cenci.' Unfortunately, in his indigna- 
tion against every conceivable form of oppression, he took a 
subject for that play too much resembling one which Shakes- 
pere had taken in his youth, 2 and still more unsuitable to the 
stage ; otherwise, besides grandeur and terror, there are things 
in it lovely as heart can worship, and the author showed him- 
self able to draw both men and women, whose names would 
have been ' familiar in our mouths as household words.' " 3 

Horace Smith, the author of " Brambletye House," pre- 
ferred " The Cenci " to the " Prometheus Unbound " because 
of its greater human interest. 4 Thomas Love Peacock did not 
like the play at first, 5 but later he acknowledged it to be a work 
of great dramatic power, and asserted his belief that, had 
Shelley lived, he would have become one of the masters of 
dramatic art. 6 Of Shelley's less important literary friends, 
Edward Williams, the author of several unpublished dramas, 
especially praised " The Cenci," 7 while Edward Trelawny, 
strangely enough for a man of his temperament, preferred the 

1 Hunt, Lord Byron and His Contemporaries, 1828, 2d ed. i. 366-67. 

2 Hunt must refer to " Pericles," supposing it a play of Shakespere's youth, 
but the resemblance to " The Cenci " is by no means so striking as he implies. 

3 Hunt, Imagination and Fancy, New York 1845, p. 216. 
*Fraser's Magazine, lxi. 105, January i860. 

5 Shelley to Mrs. Gisborne, October 13 or 14, 1819 (Shelley's Works, V 
Forman ed. viii. 132). 

6 Fraser's Magazine, lxi. 105, January i860. 

7 Trelawny, Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author, 1878, Preface 
p. xv. 
3 



18 

" Epipsychidion," 1 and Medwin, though admiring "TheCenci," 
considered the dramatic form too opposed to Shelley's natural 
genius to have allowed him ever to do his best work in that 
field. 2 

Of Byron's opinion we have several versions. According to 
Medwin's repeated statement, he considered it as " perhaps the 
best tragedy modern times have produced," " a play, — not a 
poem like Remorse and Fazio." 3 According to Shelley, " he 
was loud ... in censure." 4 According to himself (in a letter 
to Richard Belgrave Hoppner), "His [Shelley's] tragedy is 
sad work," 5 and (in a letter to Shelley), "I read Cenci — but, 
besides that I think the subject essentially wndramatic, I am 
not an admirer of your old dramatists as models. I deny that 
the English have hitherto had a drama at all. Your Cenci, 
however, was a work of power and poetry." 6 

To Keats, Shelley sent a presentation copy, and received in 
reply a somewhat oracular criticism: 

" I received a copy of ' The Cenci,' as from yourself, from 
Hunt. There is only one part of it I am judge of — the poetry 
and dramatic effect, which by many spirits nowadays is con- 
sidered the Mammon. A modern work, it is said, must have 
a purpose, which may be the God. An artist must serve Mam- 
mon ; he must have self-concentration — selfishness, perhaps. 
You, I am sure, will forgive me for sincerely remarking that 
you might curb your magnanimity and be more of an artist 
and load every rift of your subject with ore. The thought 
of such discipline must fall like cold chains upon you, who 
perhaps never sat with your wings furled for six months 
together. And is not this extraordinary talk for the writer 
of ' Endymion,' whose mind was like a pack of scattered 
cards ? " 7 

1 Trelawny, Records, Preface p. xv. 

2 Medwin, Life of Shelley, 1847, i. 349. 

8 Medwin, Byron at Pisa, New York 1824, pp. 61, 182. 

4 Shelley to Hunt, August 26, 1821 (Shelley's Works, Forman ed. viii. 237. 

5 Byron's Works, Prothero ed. v. 74 (September 10, 1820). 

6 Ibid., v. 268 (April 26, 1821). 

7 Keats to Shelley (Shelley's Poetical Works, Centenary ed. ii. 469). 



19 

Of Shelley's other great contemporaries, Coleridge has left 
no recorded judgment in regard to the play, and Wordsworth, 
in a brief conversation with Trelawny in the summer of 1820, 
only the single phrase, " Won't do." 1 

Shelley's own regard for his play seems to have gradually 
diminished. While still in the first fervor of composition, he 
had written to Hunt (Aug. 15, 1819) : " I am contemplating 
another work, totally different from anything you might con- 
sider that I should write ; of a more popular kind ; and, if 
anything of mine could deserve attention, of higher claims." 2 
A suggestion of depreciation appeared in a letter to Oilier 
on March 6 of the following year : " Cenci is written for the 
multitude and ought to sell well." 3 On May 1 he wrote of 
it to Medwin disparagingly : " I have just published a tragedy 
called ' The Cenci.' ... It is dismal enough. My chief en- 
deavor was to produce a delineation of passions which I had 
never participated in. . . ." 4 His final judgment was given in a 
conversation with Trelawny in the spring of 1822 : " The Cenci 
is a work of art ; it is not colored by my feelings nor obscured 
by my metaphysics. I don't think much of it. It gave me 
less trouble than anything I have written of the same length. 
. . . [The " Prometheus "] is original ; and cost me severe 
mental labor. Authors, like mothers, prefer the children who 
have given them most trouble." 5 

2. Later 
In his judgment of the comparative value of the " Pro- 
metheus Unbound " and " The Cenci," Shelley stood opposed 
to most of his contemporaries, but it has been his view, not 
theirs, which has prevailed in later criticism. Those Shelley 
students who have given any comparative estimate of the value 
of his works have been nearly unanimous in according the 

1 Trelawny, Recollections of the last Days of Shelley and Byron, 1858, 
ch. i. p. 13. 

2 Shelley to Hunt, August 15, 1819 (Shelley's Works, Forman ed. viii. 
115). 

3 Shelley Memorials, p. 150. 

4 Trelawny, Records, ii. 35-36. 
6 Ibid., i. 1 17-18. 



20 

preeminence among them all to the " Prometheus." 1 On the 
other hand, most of these critics have accorded " The Cenci," 
also, a high literary and dramatic value, though without much 
attempt to discriminate the two. Preeminence over the con- 
temporary tragedies of Byron and Coleridge, and the later 
dramas of Browning and Tennyson seems to have been tacitly 
accorded ; the play has been called by some critics " the great- 
est tragedy of modern times," 2 by others, " the greatest English 
tragedy since Shakespere." 3 The poet Swinburne proclaims 
it, " the greatest tragedy that had been written in any language 
for upwards of two centuries." 4 Along with this enthusiasm 
in generalization, however, there has gone an avoidance of 
detailed criticism more noticeable than in the case of any other 
of Shelley's important works. There have not appeared many 
criticisms more full or adequate than this early one by Lady 
Shelley in her " Shelley Memorials " of 1858. " The play is 
in truth, a wonderful instance of mature judgment and self- 
control — the more extraordinary when we reflect that the 
author was barely seven and twenty when he wrote it, and 
that the peculiar tendency of his genius was towards an ex- 
cessive affluence of imagination and fancy, and the embodi- 
ment of thoughts the most evanescent and impalpable in forms 
the most gorgeous and transcendent. ' The Cenci ' occupies 
entirely different ground. Everywhere we feel the earth under 
our feet. The characters are not personifications of abstract 
ideas, but are true human beings, speaking, indeed, a language 
exalted by passion, but nevertheless a language which has its 
roots in nature, and draws its sustenance from life. Awful 
are those revelations of the monstrous heart of the old man ; 
tremendous in their hopeless agony and desolation those stag- 
gerings of the mind of Beatrice on the brink of madness ; 
angelical, in its serene redemption from transitory error, that 

X R. W. Griswold, 1875; G. B. Smith, 1877; R- P- Scott, 1878; J. A. 
Symonds, 1879; Edward Dowden, 1886; H. S. Salt, 1887; Wm. Sharp, 
1887; Helene Richter, 1898; G. E. Woodberry, 1901. 

2 R. W. Griswold, 1875; Wm. M. Rossetti, 1878; R. P. Scott, 1878; H. S. 
Salt, 1887; Wm. Sharp, 1887. 

8 Geo. Griffin, 1845; Lady Shelley, 1858; J. A. Symonds, 1879. 

*A. C. Swinburne, Miscellanies, p. 120. 



21 

spirit of resignation and immortal love which rises, towards 
the close of the play, out of the hell of the earlier parts, and 
finds its most lovely expression in the final words. Never did 
poet more exquisitely show the triumph of Good over Evil 
than Shelley has done in that hushed and sacred ending. It 
is a voice out of the very depths of the suffering patience of 
humanity." 1 

In this summary we see that the literary excellence of" The 
Cenci " is taken for granted, and that its dramatic value is not 
analyzed, while the whole attention is devoted to one element 
of the play, namely, the characters. The same holds good in 
large part of the brief references to " The Cenci " that we find 
scattered through the other various books and articles on 
Shelley. 

In the majority of these the reality and dramatic power of 
the two chief characters, Beatrice and Count Cenci, is emphat- 
ically recognized. 2 For example, Todhunter in his " Study of 
Shelley," after giving an outline of the play, says " even Web- 
ster himself cannot compare with Shelley for delicacy and 
truth to nature," 3 and adds later, " the characters of Beatrice 
and her father are, indeed, evidence of a power of individual 
portraiture far above that which we find in the ordinary Eliza- 
bethan drama." 4 He speaks of " Shelley's perfect dramatic 
inspiration," and points out that " the character of Beatrice 
rises to sublimity at the end, as her father's did at the begin- 
ning." 5 

The minor characters have been less favorably treated. A 
writer in the North British Review in 1870 even asserted that 
they are mere " theatrical properties : Giacomo . . . the stage 
dupe ; Orsino . . . the stage traitor who tempts his victims as 
nearly as possible as King John tempts Hubert, or as Richard 
tempts Buckingham ; Olimpio and Marzio . . . stage assas- 

1 Shelley Memorials, p. 129. 

2 Middleton, 1858; Lady Shelley, 1858; G. B. Smith, 1877; W. M. Ros- 
setti, 1878; R. P. Scott, 1878; J. Todhunter, 1880; G. Sarrazin, 1885; H. 
S. Salt, 1887; G. E. Woodberry, 1901. 

3 Todhunter, Study of Shelley, 1880, p. 121. 
*Ibid., p. 131. 

5 Ibid., p. 128. 



22 

sins ; Camillo . . . the stage ecclesiastic." 1 On the other hand, 
Miss Helene Richter has pointed out the careful way in which 
the minor characters are grouped as foils to the chief ones, 2 
while Professor Woodberry tells us that " the characterization 
... of Orsino and Giacomo is studied with attention and in- 
genuity." 3 

The dramatic power of the blank verse in " The Cenci " was 
acknowledged, as we have seen, even by the contemporary 
reviewers at the time of publication. Later criticism has in 
general continued to praise it. Concerning its value as pure 
poetry, Dr. Anster's thesis in an article on the " Life and 
Writings of Shelley " is notable : " It is impossible for us, 
within the limits to which we must confine ourselves, to speak 
as we could wish of Shelley's mastery over language — which 
was gradually becoming perfect. The exquisite subtlety of 
his thoughts was such as to demand every aid that words could 
give, and the result was a power over language such as no 
English poet has before attained. This, had Shelley lived, 
would probably have made him our greatest poet, for there is 
no one of his poems that gives in any degree an adequate 
measure of his intellectual power. We feel of him as if he 
had created a language, in which he did not live long enough 
to have written anything. . . . The effect of such poems as 
he did write was diminished by his lavish expenditure of this 
rich and overflowing language, which goes beyond the thought, 
and instead of expressing conceals it or magnifies it into undue 
pomp. Each successive work exhibited increased power of 
condensation — and language, by doing no more than its proper 
business, had a thousandfold more power. Of this 'The 
Cenci ' is a remarkable instance. It is Shelley's greatest poem. 
The others are in comparison with it, scarcely more than the 
exercises of a boy, disciplining himself for the tasks of an 
after period of life. In modern poetry there is nothing equal 
to the passage describing the scene of the proposed murder — 
shall we not say execution — of the father. ... In this passage 

1 North British Review, liii. 52. 

2 H. Richter, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Weimar 1898, p. 405. 

3 Shelley's Works, Cambridge ed., p. 626. 



23 

the description of the rock overhanging the precipice, and the 
simile forced as it were on the imagination of the speaker, by 
the circumstances in which she is compelled to think of her 
father's guilt, is absolutely the finest thing we have ever 
read." 1 

On the other hand, the dramatic power of the verse, the 
realism of the characters, the stage value of the action, all 
are embraced in one sweeping attack by John M. Robertson, 
when he concludes a brilliant wholesale denunciation of 
Shelley's major poems in the following manner: "One after 
one, on examination, the long poems for which so much has 
been claimed are found to be faulty, diffuse, charmless, ill- 
considered, wearisome — so much ' rhymed English,' as Emer- 
son bluntly put it. ' The Cenci ' best bears study, and it must 
be allowed that Shelley has handled his ill-chosen subject with 
no small energy and pains. It is sometimes claimed for him 
that his tragedy places him next to Shakespere among modern 
English poets ; but to pronounce such a judgment on the 
datum that no tragedy of importance had been produced be- 
tween Shakespere and Shelley is to use misleading language. 2 
' The Cenci ' has indeed a quality of emotion and stress not 
to be found in the intermediate work ; but all the same it fails 
to take rank as an original and successful drama. Half a 
dozen times over we find direct imitations of Shakespere, but 
of Shaksperian concision and lifelikeness there is little. It 
has the literary faults of the ' poetic drama ' without that terse 
intensity of style which in Shakspere seems to fuse the most 
extravagant imagery into living speech. The poet tells us in 
his preface that he has ' avoided with great care in writing this 
play the introduction of what is called mere poetry ' ; but in 
point of fact the declamation is constantly in Shelley's own 
poetic style ; and he introduces the merest of ' mere poetry ' 
just where it is most inadmissible, as when Camillo is made to 
say of Marzio : 

J North British Review, viii. November 1847. 

2 To imply, as Mr. Robertson does, that there is " no tragedy of im- 
portance " to be found in the works of Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster 
Massinger, Ford, Otway, and Dryden is also to " use misleading language." 



24 

" He shrinks from her regard like autumn's leaf 
From the keen breath of the serenest north." 

Most fatal defect of all, Beatrice is quite imperfectly individ- 
ualized, being here a personage of all too Shelleyan fecundity 
of phrase, who in her supreme moments, with one exception, 
substitutes verbose violence for the terrible simplicity of gen- 
uine feeling in extremity. The exception is the last speech of 
all, which is entirely and astonishingly excellent. These lines 
and some others, including those introducing Beatrice's song, 
do recall Shakspere ; and suggest questions as to Shelley's cere- 
bral variability ; but our final judgment must be that while 
' The Cenci,' despite its impracticable subject, is in respect of 
literary quality more readable than any other of Shelley's 
longer works, it is not fated to become a classic. In its kind 
it is superseded by Browning." 1 

" The Cenci " does not seem to be a particular favorite with 
the chief American student of Shelley, Professor Woodberry, 
whose note in the Cambridge edition is very brief and some- 
what perfunctory. He sums up the final impression of the 
play in the following significant but one-sided statement: 
" The total effect is of intense and awful gloom. ... In it 
culminates that fascination of horror in Shelley which was as 
characteristic as his worship of beauty and love, though it is 
less omnipresent in his poetry." 2 

The last noteworthy discussion of ' The Cenci ' appears in 
an interesting contrast between it and the early work of 
Shakespere, in Mr. A. A. Jack's recent monograph on Shelley. 
Mr. Jack finds that, " Shelley has a cooler grasp of the tragic 
issue ; he is more absorbed in the meaning of his tragedy than 
the young Shakspere ever was." On the other hand, there is 
an opulence of dramatic material in Shakespere which we do 
not find in Shelley. " The Cenci is a tragedy in line, of one 
attitude," and "we feel as if Shelley's voice were exhausted 
in that note." Mr. Jack also asserts that the earlier part 
of the tragedy, in which Cenci is of chief importance, is the 

X J. M. Robertson, New Essays towards a Critical Method, London 1897, 
PP. 233-35- 

2 Shelley's Works, 1901, Cambridge ed., p. 626. 



25 

part which is most characteristic of Shelley, but is least 
dramatic. 1 

With this final utterance of literary criticism, which is in 
direct opposition to the impression of the dramatic critics who 
saw the play performed in 1886, we may fittingly turn back to 
the story of that production, the most interesting event in the 
history of Shelley's drama. Since " The Cenci " was originally 
written for the stage, the judgment of the theater is important 
— in all that concerns its dramatic power far more important 
than the judgment of literary critics. 

1 A. A. Jack, Shelley, An Essay, London 1904, p. 120. 



IV 

Production of " The Cenci " in 1886 

The manifest histrionic opportunities in " The Cenci " have 
often attracted the attention of actors. Macready, after he 
had left the stage, is reported to have said that he would return 
if he could have the opportunity to appear as Count Cenci. 1 
Samuel Phelps carefully examined the play with a view to its 
production, but came to the conclusion that its dramatic interest 
terminated with the death of Count Cenci. 2 Miss Glyn (Mrs. 
Dallas) had a lifelong ambition to play the part of Beatrice, 
but her managers constantly refused. 3 Miss Genevieve Ward 
also desired to appear in this role, and at one time seriously 
discussed the question of giving a private performance. 4 In 
July, 1885, at a meeting of the Wagner Society, Miss Alma 
Murray (Mrs. Alfred Forman), a young actress of talent, 
gave a dramatic reading of the last scene of " The Cenci." 5 

It was left for the Shelley Society, however, in the first 
year of its organization actually to bring the play as a whole 
upon the stage. In doing so they met with many difficulties. 
Of course the old charge of the immorality of the play was 
revived. The newspapers held aloof from the undertaking, 
and the Lord Chancellor refused to permit a public perform- 
ance. The Shelley Society then resorted to the plan of renting 
a theater for a private performance, with admission by invita- 
tion only. They found no trouble in procuring capable actors 
to give their services. Miss Alma Murray, who had gained 
considerable reputation as the Constance of Browning's " In a 
Balcony," and had on the very first day of the Shelley Society's 

1 Shelley Society, Original Prospectus, December 8, 1885. 

2 Shelley Society Note Book, p. 188. 

3 Ibid., p. 8. 

* Ibid., p. 55. 

5 Shelley Society Note Book, p. 11. 

26 



27 

existence received an invitation to play the part of Beatrice, 
now responded with enthusiasm and delight. Mr. Hermann 
Vezin, one of the most talented actors of the English stage, 
undertook the part of Count Cenci. 

In preparation for the performance, Messrs. H. Buxton 
Forman and Alfred Forman published an edition of the play. 
As a frontispiece, Mr. W. B. Scott made an etching of Guido's 
Beatrice, and thus at last another of Shelley's original desires 
was fulfilled. The editors prefaced the text with a brief 
aesthetic discussion, pointing out the high degree in which the 
play aroused that pity and fear which Aristotle deemed essen- 
tial to great tragedy, and ranking it in this respect with the 
" Oedipus Tyrannus," " Medea," " King Lear," and " Phedre." 
The Shelley translation of the Italian manuscript account was 
given in an appendix. There were no notes of any kind in 
this edition, which was designed chiefly as a popular hand- 
book for the performance. 

On the afternoon of Friday, May 7, 1886, at the Grand 
Theater, Islington, before an audience of something more than 
twenty-five hundred invited guests, the play was presented. 
The mounting and costuming were careful, though not so 
elaborate as to give the scenery any independent value. The 
drama was given literally according to the published text, 
without " cuts " or changes of any kind, save for a verse Pro- 
logue by Mr. John Todhunter, and a division into six acts 
instead of five — the division coming in the middle of the third 
act. The performance occupied nearly four hours, but this 
length of time, very unusual in a modern drama, did not seem 
to weary the audience, which, from the beginning to the end, 
listened spell-bound, rewarding every act with tumults of 
applause. At the end of the play, when Miss Murray was 
called back to the stage, the enthusiasm reached its climax, 
and the entire audience rose spontaneously and cheered. 1 The 
comments in the lobbies after the play were loud and enthu- 
siastic. 2 Judging from the general attitude of that audience, 
one would have been justified in supposing that " The Cenci " 

1 Shelley Society Note Book, 51-53- 

2 Ibid., 65. 



28 

was a great dramatic success. 1 But the theatrical critics were 
not yet heard from — and when their verdict appeared it told a 
very different tale. 

The success of the particular performance before its special 
audience was acknowledged, and unanimously enthusiastic 
praise was accorded to the acting, especially to that of Miss 
Murray, which the Weekly Dispatch called the finest piece of 
tragic impersonation that had been seen for twenty-five years. 
But the play itself was condemned by the vast majority of the 
critics as entirely undramatic. Certain scenes, as presented, 
had indeed impressed them, notably Beatrice's appeal to the 
guests at the banquet, in the first act ; the climax at the begin- 
ning of the third act — according to Le Figaro " la plus belle 
scene" of the performance; Cenci's curse in the fourth act; 
and the final speech of the play ; but the merit of these scenes 
was attributed rather to the actors than to the drama itself. 
The play aroused in the breasts of the theatrical critics, for 
the most part, only the emotions of horror, 2 disgust 3 and weari- 
ness. 4 They stigmatized it as gloomy, 5 and as most unwhole- 
some. 6 The beauty and pathos which had been found in the 
drama by literary critics were hardly mentioned. The jour- 
nalists went on to assert that the success of the play before a 
packed house of Shelley admirers, inclined to judge from a 
literary rather than a dramatic standpoint, could in no wise be 
accepted as indicative of genuine dramatic merit. 7 

Unfortunately for a just estimate of the play it is evident 
from the tone of the theatrical criticisms that if the Shelley 

1 The following papers referred to the favorable attitude of the audience : 
Hornsey and Finsbury Park Journal, May 18; Lloyd's Weekly London 
Newspaper, May g ; Oxford Magazine, May 12; Western Daily Mercury, 
May 8; Athenaeum, May 15; Echo, May 8; Evening News, May 8; Satur- 
day Review, May 15. 

2 Daily Chronicle, Echo, Evening News, Liverpool Courier, Lloyd's 
Weekly, Morning Post, Times. 

3 Times. 

* Times, Daily Telegraph, Morning Post. 

5 Evening News, Observer. 

6 Daily Chronicle, Daily Telegraph, Hornsey and Finsbury Park Journal, 
Lloyd's Weekly, Scotsman, Times. 

Athenceum, Daily Chronicle, Echo, Saturday Review. 



29 

Society went with favorable prepossessions, most of the jour- 
nalists suffered from at least equally violent unfavorable ones. 
Some of them began by speaking of the play as " Shelley's 
hideous tragedy," 1 and others by insisting that it was morally 
unfit for performance. 2 The majority attacked the play pri- 
marily on moral, and only secondarily on dramatic grounds, 
and the dramatic objections were often dragged in for the 
manifest purpose of bolstering up the moral prejudice. 

Yet, on the other hand, even in the few cases where this 
moral prejudice was inoperative, the journalists were virtually 
united in condemnation of the play. The following from the 
skilled hand of Mr. William Archer — the last man, surely, to 
be accused of prudishness — is in perfect harmony with the 
general tenor of his colleagues' remarks, and may be taken as 
the most authoritative utterance of the theatrical press on this 
occasion : 

" The reasons which render ' The Cenci ' an impossible play 
are not far to seek. Partly from inexperience, partly from 
having to deal with things unspeakable and a fortiori unact- 
able, Shelley handled his romantic theme in a pseudo-classic 
fashion. Without attaining the repose, dignity, and perfect 
form of classicism, he sacrificed the life, movement, relief, 
variety of the romantic drama. Though he knew ' Faust ' he 
seems to have overlooked the invaluable maxim of the Man- 
ager in the second prologue : 

" Besonders aber lasst genug geschehn ! 
Man kommt zu schaun, man will am liebsten sehn." 

Nothing happens in ' The Cenci,' or rather everything happens 
behind the scenes. ' Hamlet ' and ' Macbeth ' are brilliant pano- 
ramic displays compared with ' The Cenci.' ... A play of 
pure recitation — Racine's ' Phedre,' for example, or Goethe's 
' Iphigenie ' — has for me, I confess, a peculiar charm, but that is 
because the emotion, however intense, is subdued and harmon- 
ized by a lofty repose, a chiselled perfection, of ideal utter- 
ance. ' Iphigenie auf Tauris,' adequately acted, resembles an 

1 Daily Chronicle, Daily Telegraph. 

2 Echo, Scotsman, Times. 



30 

alto-rilievo endowed with life and motion, yet sacrificing not 
a jot of its calm nobility. ' The Cenci ' is like the Laocoon 
group set writhing and roaring for three or four mortal hours 
by the spell of some wanton magician. It has this advantage 
over other recent successes of ennui, that its language is as 
perspicuous as it is vigorous, and its verse, though unequal, 
freely and finely modulated. No one who reads it intelligently 
can doubt that there were in Shelley the makings of a drama- 
tist ; but after seeing it on the stage, one has to read it over 
again to reassure oneself of the fact." 1 

During the two years of 1887 and 1888 the administrative 
committee of the Shelley Society cherished the hope of repeat- 
ing the performance, but in neither year were there sufficient 
funds forthcoming, and the idea had to be abandoned. In 
1892 on the occasion of Shelley's Centenary an effort was again 
made to have the play presented on the stage, but the obstacles 
in the way of obtaining a theater proved to be too great. 2 
From the latter date until the present year there has been no 
known attempt at performance of " The Cenci." 

1 The World, May 12, 1886. 

2 Shelley's Poetical Works, Centenary ed. ii. 465. 



Shelley's Cenci and the Cenci of History 

That Shelley believed in the strict historical accuracy of the 
manuscript narrative upon which he based his play there can 
be no question. He had no reason to do otherwise. The nar- 
rative, although it makes no overt claim to possess contem- 
porary authority, nevertheless reads as if written at the time 
by one personally familiar with the events recorded, and with 
its simple yet graphic realism and unartificial mention of 
minute details it produces an effect almost as convincing as a 
passage from Defoe. 

After Shelley's drama had given a new interest to the sub- 
ject of " The Cenci " other manuscripts, similar and dissimilar, 
gradually found their way into print. 1 Although the publish- 
ers of the majority claimed for them historical accuracy based 
on more or less personal investigation, one and all they were 
either discredited or superseded by the work of Signor Berto- 

1 The more important of these accounts are to be found in the following 

Looks and articles : 

Stendhal (Henri Marie Beyle), Les Cenci, in Revue des Deux Mondes, 
1837; republished in Chroniques et Nouvelles, 1855, and in Stendhal's 
(Euvres, 1888, i. 197-231. 

Keppel Craven, Excursions in the Abruzzi and Northern Provinces of 
Naples, London 1838 i. 250 ff. 

Val. Parisot, Article on Beatrice Cenci in Michaud's Biographie Univer- 
selle, Paris 1844, vii. 317-21. • 

J. Whittle, Bentley's Miscellany, August 1847. 

James Whiteside, Italy in the Nineteenth Century, London 1848, ii. ch. xi. 

Scolari, Memorica Storica, Milan 1856. 

More recently a very detailed but untrustworthy account was published by 
Arturo Vecchini, Note sulla famiglia Cenci in II Convito vol. x.-xi., 
Roma 1898. Vecchini claimed to have found "in un paisello sul 
Chienti " a bulky MS. which he declared to have been a transcript 
from an original in the Vatican. A careful search by Prof. Richard 
Holbrook in 1906 failed to bring this "original" to light. 

31 



32 

lotti 1 in 1877 and 1879. This writer found it possible by a long 
and thorough examination of the documents in the papal ar- 
chives and notarial offices at Rome to elucidate practically all 
the historical questions connected with the narrative of the 
Cenci. The following is a brief summary of the points wherein 
he corrects or adds to the account used by Shelley. 

Francesco Cenci, born in 1549, was an illegitimate son of 
Cristoforo Cenci and Beatrice Arias, a married woman. After 
the death of her husband, Cristoforo legitimized Francesco, 
and finally, on his own death-bed, married Beatrice. The son 
was left with a heavy informal debt upon his shoulders, for 
Cristoforo as treasurer-general of the Apostolic Chamber had 
been guilty of embezzlement, and the Papacy came down upon 
Francesco repeatedly for portions of this money. His own 
crimes, moreover, brought in a large sum to the Papal treasury 
in fines. He first appeared in court at the age of eleven 
charged with brawling ; at fourteen he was in trouble over an 
illegitimate child; and from that time onward he was contin- 
ually before the papal courts on charges ranging from brawl- 
ing and cruelty towards servants up to sodomy and murder. 
It is estimated that in all, he paid to the Pope 155,000 crowns, 
which, reckoned as it should be at five times its modern equiva- 
lent, gives the sum of $945,000. Walter Savage Landor was 
quite justified when he said " after St. Peter, King Pepin, and 
Countess Matilda, the Roman See was under greater obliga- 
tions to him [Francesco Cenci] than to any other supporter." 2 

By his first wife, Ersilia, Cenci had twelve children, of whom 
five died in infancy. The others were Giacomo, Antonina, 
Cristoforo, Rocco, Beatrice, 2 Bernardo, and Paolo, the last un- 
mentioned in Shelley's drama. These children seem to have 
possessed some of the family traits. Giacomo, as steward of 
the household, robbed his father of 13,000 crowns by forgery. 
Rocco with his friend Mario Querro (Shelley's Orsino), ac- 

1 A. Bertolotti, Francesco Cenci e la sua famiglia, Firenze 1877, 2d ed. 
1879. His account has been recently reproduced in essentials by F. Marion 
Crawford, Century; January, 1908. 

2 Landor, Beatrice Cenci : Five Scenes. Preface. 

3 Beatrice was born February 12, 1577, and was thus twenty-two at the 
time of her execution. 



33 

cording to the deposition of Lady Beatrice, one night stole 
four shirts of Francesco, eleven of his handkerchiefs, a priest's 
dress, four cushions, a silver basin, some towels, and a piece 
of tapestry. This deposition tends to overthrow the unsup- 
ported legend that Beatrice was in love with Querro, who was 
in fact forty years old at the time of the murder of Cenci. Rocco 
was not slain while attending mass, as in Shelley's manuscript 
narrative, but in a duel which occurred in the street. Cristoforo 
was murdered by a rival for the favors of the wife of a fisher- 
man. The murder of Cenci, at the castle of Petrella on Sep- 
tember 9, 1598 by Marzio de Fiorani and Olimpio Calvetti, 
took place substantially as Shelley's manuscript narrative gives 
it, as did also the other events up to the time of the trial. Fari- 
naccio, the chief counsel for the defense, a brilliant but rather 
unscrupulous lawyer of doubtful personal character, succeeded 
in saving Bernardo's life on the false plea that he was of weak 
intellect, and advanced the charge of incest against the dead 
Cenci, but without other proof than that Beatrice had been 
kept a prisoner by him. The execution took place, not as in 
Shelley's manuscript narrative on May 11, but on September 
11, 1599. Thirty-five years after Beatrice's death, a secret 
codicil to her will was found leaving a large sum, with elabo- 
rate precautions against discovery, to a " certain poor boy," 
probably a natural son of her own. And the report of an 
alleged 1 confession of Beatrice states that she admitted having 
yielded her honor to Olimpio Calvetti, the warden of Petrella, 
in order to induce him to murder her father. 

Thus in the light of the miscalled " sober " facts of history, 
the lofty tragedy of the family of the Cenci becomes a piti- 
fully grotesque and vulgar affair. We may well be thankful 
that Shelley lived before the truth was known, for otherwise 
we should be the poorer by the loss of a great poem. But the 
value which has been sometimes claimed for his drama as a 
true reflection of Italian conditions at the beginning of the 
sixteenth century plainly does not exist. 

1 The authenticity of this confession is controverted, not with entire 
success, by Prof. Francesco Sabatini, La Torre dei Cenci e La Leggenda 
di Beatrice, Roma, 1906. 
4 



34 

This, of course, involves no vital criticism of Shelley. He 
was writing, not a history, but a tragedy, and even had he 
known the actual facts in the case, it would have been neces- 
sary to idealize them in some such way as his source had done. 
On the other hand, it should be pointed out that Miss Helene 
Richter, who in her admirable book upon Shelley contrasts 
the supposed historical accuracy of " The Cenci " with the 
inaccuracy of Byron's " Marino Faliero," 1 directly inverts the 
actual situation. Not only did Byron in general have far more 
historical sense than Shelley, but in the special case of " Marino 
Faliero " he at least made an attempt to obtain a trustworthy 
account, whereas Shelley accepted at its face value and without 
investigation, the first manuscript that came to hand. 

Furthermore, in his treatment of this source Shelley exer- 
cised a large artistic liberty. Piety and formal religion play 
a great part in the Italian narrative, where Cenci is censured 
for his atheism, and Beatrice and Lucretia are praised for their 
devoutness. This is entirely altered by Shelley, who substi- 
tutes for the Italian concernment with ecclesiastical forms and 
ceremonies, a northern intensity of individual religious feeling 
and a sense of direct relationship with God quite alien to the 
Roman Catholic conception of things. This alteration changes 
the whole spirit of the situation, and in place of the Italian 
sensuousness in both crime and piety it presents an inner spir- 
ituality and emotional subjectivity much more Teutonic than 
Latin. These changes I shall discuss in more detail in my 
chapter on the characters, where I shall point out how they are 
all changes for the better, dramatically and artistically. Here 
I wish merely to insist upon their significance from the his- 
torical point of view. From this point of view it is evident 
that they take away all possibility of regarding the play as a 
careful study of Italian life in the sixteenth century, or as any 
contribution to our historical knowledge. 

1 Helene Richter, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Weimar 1898, p. 394. 



VI 

Dramatic Structure 

During Shelley's lifetime the English stage was in an inter- 
esting condition. Rarely in its entire history has it been 
endowed with better actors or poorer playwrights than in the 
first quarter of the nineteenth century. 

Covent Garden Theater in 1803 came under the manage- 
ment of John Philip Kemble, the great tragedian upon whose 
shoulders had fallen the ample robe of Garrick ; the theater 
continued under his direction for fifteen years, during which 
time it burned down and was then rebuilt on a much larger 
scale. Associated with John Kemble in the Covent Garden 
Company there were: his brother Charles Kemble, a graceful 
and finished actor of romantic roles ; his sister Sarah Siddons, 
the greatest tragic actress the English stage has yet seen ; 
George Frederick Cooke, a tragedian who, when sober, was 
almost equal to Kemble ; " Dolly " Jordan, the best actress of 
men's parts recorded in stage history ; Young, a polished and 
talented tragic actor; Lewis, Liston, and Mrs. Mattocks, all 
of high contemporary fame in comedy and farce. When some 
of these actors began to retire at about the end of the first 
decade of the century, other actors and actresses came forward 
to take their places : in 1814 the Miss O'Neil whom Shelley 
desired for his Beatrice ; in 1816, William Charles Macready 
and Junius Brutus Booth. 

Drury Lane, after running down hill under the reckless 
management of Sheridan, suffered like its rival a loss from fire, 
and for three years its company found a refuge at the Lyceum ; 
in 1812 the theater was rebuilt, and with the acquisition of 
Edmund Kean in 1814 it started on a new career of eminence. 
While with the exception of Kean, its company was not quite 
so strong as that of the rival house, it possessed in Robert 
Elliston a tragedian of versatility and accomplishment, in John 
35 



36 

Bannister a comedian of celebrity, and in Dowton an unsur- 
passed actor of low comedy and farce. 

Surely here was an array of histrionic talent in both houses 
that ought to have inspired creative drama of a high order. 
But actually it did nothing of the kind. Seldom have original 
productions upon the English stage sunk to a lower ebb than 
in those twenty-five years during the triumph of the Kembles 
and Mrs. Siddons and Kean. The writing of tragedy seems 
to have been a lost art. Although the dramas of Shakespere 
were continually played to crowded houses, — and curiously 
enough it was his tragedies rather than his comedies that were 
most frequently presented, — and although there was an occa- 
sional revival of plays by Massinger, Fletcher, and others, yet 
there was no contemporary tragedy worthy even of the name. 

At the end of the century both Kotzebue's " The Spaniards 
in Peru," and his " Misanthropy and Repentance " had been 
introduced on the London stage, and had won immediate 
favor; during the next few years many others of his plays 
were enacted in England, and were widely read as well. 
These exerted some influence on the development of another 
type of play which had been in existence for some time, — 
the drama of terror, a transplantation to the stage of themes 
and motives from the romances of the Radcliffian school 
which had been appearing in great numbers during the pre- 
ceding decade. Matthew Gregory Lewis was the most suc- 
cessful writer of this species of play; his "Castle Spectre," a 
piece bristling with unbelievable crimes, hair-breadth escapes, 
and supernatural interference, had enjoyed a long run in 1797 ; 
and in the early years of the new century his " Alfonso King 
of Castile," " Adelgitha," and " Venoni," continued the popu- 
larity of the genre in a more modified and restrained form. 
In spite of crudity, extravagance, and bare- faced endeavor to 
create the necessary thrill of horror at whatever cost to proba- 
bility of plot or consistency of characterization, these plays had 
the merits of vigor and stage effectiveness, and they were by 
no means out of harmony with the larger intellectual and 
literary movement of the time. 

But in 1802 a novelty of a different type was introduced by 



37 

Holcroft in a translation from the French, called "The Life 
of Mystery," a " melo-drama " in which elaborate scenery was 
used and the dialogue was accompanied by descriptive music. 
This type immediately became so popular that it practically 
ruled the stage for the next thirty , years. The most fertile 
and ingenious of the English playwrights gave their attention 
to it, and turned out play after play of this sort with amazing 
rapidity % Dimond, Hook, Dibdin, Morton, Pocock, and Soane 
are the names of those who especially caught the art of pleas- 
ing the public in this way. The type was a very flexible one, 
allowing medleys of everything from tragedy to farce, although 
always accompanied by music. Many of Sir Walter Scott's 
novels were made over into this kind of drama, Morton's 
"Lady of the Lake" and Pocock's "Rob Roy" being the 
most notable of these adaptations ; also, medieval themes from 
other sources appeared, and elements from the drama of terror 
were frequently incorporated. But from its very nature, the 
type was entirely without dramatic sincerity, and without lit- 
erary value. The writing of such pot-pourris did not attract 
writers of worth. With the single exception of Sheridan 
Knowles, whose classical tragedies came to the front shortly 
after Shelley's death, until the time of Bulwer Lytton there 
was no nineteenth century author of even third rate literary 
merit who had any continuous connection with the theater. 

It is not surprising that the real leaders of English Litera- 
ture should have turned away in disgust from a stage that 
seemed to be in the hands of mere theatrical artisans, or that 
they should have failed to realize the dependence of the drama 
upon the theater. To them the drama came to mean merely 
one form of literature, which might or might not gain some- 
thing from representation on the stage before the multitude. 
Their air of condescension and their dilettante attitude when- 
ever they undertook to write plays for production showed that 
they had no conception of the actual nature of the dramatist's 
art. Had it been otherwise, and had Wordsworth, Coleridge, 
Byron, Shelley, and Keats devoted themselves seriously to 
learning the craftsmanship of the art, we might well have had 
an English romantic drama at least as successful as the French. 



38 

The French school was as temperamentally lyric as the 
English ; the difference was simply that the French writers 
knew that the drama was not a department of lyric poetry, 
but that it had laws of its own, which they proceeded to learn, 
while the English trusted to their poetic inspiration, and never 
perceived that a knowledge of stage craftsmanship was nec- 
essary. 

A brief account of the dramatic work of the chief English 
romanticists is here needful to show where Shelley stood in 
relation to his fellows. For it is in relation to Milman, 
Maturin, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and Byron, that 
Shelley as a dramatist is naturally first to be considered, since 
his work belongs to the same general school of poetic drama 
as theirs. 

Certain main characteristics hold true of the entire school. 
They were all men of literary attainments and literary training, 
who had served no apprenticeship to the stage and knew little 
of technical theatrical requirements ; their ideals were literary 
and not dramatic. They were all directly inspired by the 
romantic mood: romantic lyricism, emphasis upon expression 
in words rather than in deeds, emphasis upon emotion rather 
than volition, characterize their plays. These become trage- 
dies of feeling instead of tragedies of the will. For a struggle 
between conflicting motives they substitute an alternation be- 
tween contradictory moods. Dramatic situations are regarded, 
consciously or unconsciously, as possessing their chief raison 
d'etre in the opportunity offered for the writing of emotional 
lyric poetry, and as a natural result this poetry is often senti- 
mental, and lacks any sufficient basis in outer fact. 

With the exception of Milman's " Fazio " and the three 
classical plays of Byron, all of these works reveal a strong 
influence from the drama of terror upon their plot, setting, 
characterization, and the fundamental nature of their emo- 
tional appeal. This appeal is made to three chief feelings: 
romantic love, curiosity, and horror. The works of the group 
treat of love as the main theme, and set it forth with all the 
sentiment of which the writers are capable. A simple work- 
ing out of this theme, however, is not trusted to furnish a 



39 

sufficient emotional interest. For this, resort is made to the 
curiosity aroused by complicated plots, disguised characters, 
and the unravelling of mysterious secrets, usually of a hor- 
rible nature. In harmony with these elements of mystery and 
horror, the setting is always medieval, and the machinery of 
the drama of terror, — castle, monastery, secret passages, and 
dungeons, — is generally retained intact. The emphasis upon 
horror appears especially in the treatment of the characters. 
These are usually contrasted along Rousseauesque lines ; the 
hero belongs to the romantic ideal, the brave, chivalrous, intro- 
spective, but not subtle " natural man," at war with society ; the 
counter-action is represented in various ways, but most fre- 
quently by individual, highly intellectual monsters of villainy. 
It is in the portrayal of these villains that the romantic delight 
in horror reaches its highest pitch; Maturin's De Zelos, and 
to a certain extent his hero-villain Bertram, Wordsworth's 
Oswald, Coleridge's Ordonio and Emerick, and Keats's Conrad 
all belong to the same type — enormously wicked, capable of 
any cruelty or crime, subtle, crafty, cunning, intellectual, and 
absolutely without conscience. The romantic hero is generally 
a babe in the hands of this grim adversary, whose murderous 
designs supply the action of the play, and produce the katharsis 
of horror at the end. 

The lesser members of this group, Milman and Maturin, 
require only a few words ; the others, although no better as 
dramatists, are of such unquestioned literary importance as to 
demand a somewhat fuller treatment. 

Milman's "Fazio" was produced in 1815, and was the suc- 
cess of the season. It was written, the author tells us, " with 
some view to the stage," but it owed its favorable reception far 
more to the splendid acting of Miss O'Neil than to any in- 
trinsic merits of its own. The play is, in truth, a most unfor- 
tunate combination of romanticism and classicism : its main 
theme — the corrupting power of wealth and luxury — is a 
commonplace of romanticism, and its characters are endowed 
with the romantic fullness of expression and total lack of 
dignified reserve; but on the other hand, its construction is 
semi-classical, and dismal scenes of mere dialogue without 
action make up the bulk of the work. 



40 

Very different is Maturin's " Bertram," the success of 1816, 
an out-and-out production of the school of terror, and romantic 
to its very core. The chief character, Bertram, was drawn 
plainly from the model of Byron's Corsair and Lara,. to which 
fact, united with the gorgeous scenery of its first production 
and the power of Edmund Kean's acting, must be attributed, 
doubtless, a considerable part of its success. Yet the play is 
by no means destitute of very genuine dramatic merit; the 
construction is well managed, every act after the first having 
its strong stage situation, and the climax in the fourth act 
involving a thrilling scene of sustained suspense not without 
power over even a modern reader far removed from sympathy 
with the pseudo-medievalism of the characters. On the whole, 
as a stage play "Bertram" seems the most meritorious of any 
of those produced in the period under discussion. But its 
merits were apparently accidental, or at least due to mental 
conditions which Maturin could not repeat. His next play, 
" Manuel," contained the same " terrible " pseudo-medieval 
types of character, but entirely lacked the strong situations of 
" Bertram " ; even with Edmund Kean in the chief role it 
proved a complete failure on the stage. 

Wordsworth wrote but one play, " The Borderers." It was 
the product of three years' labor ( 1795-7), * an d when it was 
finally completed Wordsworth was of exactly the same age as 
Shelley when " The Cenci " was composed. Written in the 
first instance with no thought of the stage, as Wordsworth 
himself tells us, 2 it was curtailed at the suggestion of a certain 
Mr. Knight, an actor, and sent to one of the Covent Garden 
troupe in November, 1797. This latter unknown personage 
expressed great admiration for the play, so Wordsworth and 
his sister went to the expense and trouble of a stage-coach 
journey to London to see if they could get it accepted. Three 
weeks were spent at the metropolis, but in vain ; the play was 
rejected. 3 Long after, when Wordsworth had apparently for- 

1 Christopher Wordsworth, Memoirs of William Wordsworth, 1851, 
i. 96-97, "3- 

2 The Borderers, 1842, preface. 

3 Christopher Wordsworth, Memoirs, i. 113. 



41 

gotten his journey and the three weeks' tedious delay in Lon- 
don, he wrote: "I had no hope, nor even a wish (though a 
successful play would in the then state of my finances have 
been a most welcome piece of good fortune) that he [the 
manager of Covent Garden] should accept my performance." 1 

Dramatically speaking, the work has hardly a single merit : 
it is exaggerated in plot, morbid in characterization, and senti- 
mentally emotional in style. There is some rather plain imita- 
tion of Shakespere : " King Lear " gives the cue for Idonea's 
curse in the last act; the hero, Marmaduke, betrays many of 
the characteristics of Hamlet, particularly in the scene where 
he hesitates at the commission of the murder which he believes 
justice demands ; and the dark and villainous Oswald reminds 
us strongly both of Shakespere's Iago and of Schiller's Franz 
Moor ; but in the larger aspects of the plot and setting and in 
the spirit of the whole, it is to Schiller far more than to Shakes- 
pere that indebtedness is due. Wordsworth undoubtedly in- 
tended his piece to be a kind of English " Robbers," and from 
this point of view, its wild revolt against society, its idealiza- 
tion of the magnanimous outlaw hero, its bare heaths under 
the open sky of nature, and its free expression of emotion 
present a most interesting continuation of the Sturm and 
Drang mood. The revolutionary attitude of Godwinism is 
here given plain, if incoherent utterance, sixteen years before 
its immortalization in " Queen Mab." As a flaming outbreak 
of individualism " The Borderers " is significant, especially so 
in its surprising contrast to the self-control attained by Words- 
worth in the very next year; but as a drama, it significance is 
slight indeed. Schiller with all his wildness and absurdity of 
characterization makes his play dramatically effective through 
vigorous scenes of action. The English follower of Schiller, 
writing without the stage in mind, introduces even greater 
absurdities of characterization without the compensating scenes 
of action ; emotional exclamation, either in soliloquy or dialogue 
is his sole resource. 

Coleridge, in the summer and autumn of 1797, completed a 
romantic play entitled " Osorio," and sent it to Drury Lane. 

1 The Borderers, 1842, preface. 



42 

It was rejected by Sheridan whose "sole objection," as Cole- 
ridge wrote complainingly, " is, the obscurity of the three last 
acts." 1 To a friend, Sheridan was more confidential, saying 
that he had received a tragedy from Coleridge which had one 
extraordinary line : " Drip, Drip." " In short," he added, " it 
is all dripping." 2 The play remained in darkness and oblivion 
for fifteen years, until 1812, when it was accepted by the Drury 
Lane committee, through the influence of Lord Byron. Nu- 
merous alterations were made, 3 and it was eventually produced 
under a new name, " Remorse," on January 23, 1813. 4 Ac- 
cording to all accounts a considerable success seems to have 
been achieved. Coleridge received £400, and the play ran for 
twenty nights. When printed, it quickly demanded a second 
and a third edition. It is known to have been repeated in 
1813 and 1814 at Calne by a travelling company, and it was 
even given occasionally at the metropolis in later years. Cole- 
ridge was now fairly launched on the career of a successful 
dramatist, and he had only himself to blame that he did not 
pursue it. After the appearance of " Remorse " he allowed 
two years to pass without making another attempt. Then in 
1815 he wrote " Zapolya," and the next spring procured its 
acceptance at Drury Lane on condition of certain alterations. 
These Coleridge agreed to make, but, instead of attempting 
them, he became despondent and did nothing. Maturin's 
" Bertram " was eventually accepted by Drury Lane in place 
of " Zapolya," and Coleridge found his only consolation in 
writing a scathing criticism of the new play when it was pro- 
duced. Thenceforth he attempted no further creative work 
in the field of drama. The possible loss to the stage in his case 
was much greater than in that of Wordsworth, since Coleridge, 
unlike his brother-poet, had come to know the difference be- 
tween genuine tragedies and mere morbid tales of villainy. 
Where Coleridge's chief interest lay, however, is shown by his 

Coleridge to Poole, December (?) 1797 (J- Dykes Campbell, S. T. Cole- 
ridge, 1894, p. 78). 

2 James Gillman, Life of Coleridge, 1838, p. 265. 

3 Campbell, p. 189. 
* Ibid., p. 190. 



43 

remark that he liked " Remorse," because " certain pet abstract 
notions of mine are therein expounded." 1 

These notions were certainly abstract, and they were cer- 
tainly fully expounded, but they were not of a nature possibly 
to form a good drama. Nothing can well be imagined more 
intrinsically untheatrical than a play whose chief end and aim 
is to show the subjective development of remorse in the char- 
acter of its villain ; throughout we are continually offended by 
overt didacticism, and are perpetually defrauded of the action 
which we demand ; whenever we are led to expect that the 
injured Don Alvar is about to close in a death struggle with 
his wicked brother, the next moment the good hero decides 
to obtain his revenge simply by praying for his enemy's soul. 
It is a testimony to considerable dramatic ability on Coleridge's 
part that with such a theme he should have been able to make 
his play as successful as it was. The characters are much 
more consistent and interesting than Wordsworth's abnormal 
monsters, but they are still in harmony with the tradition of 
the drama of terror. Other evidences of the same lineage are 
the setting of the play in medieval Spain, the prominence of 
cave, castle, and dungeon, the introduction of the Inquisition, 
and the emphasis upon superstition and mystery. In spirit 
" Remorse " is similar to " The Borderers," preaching freedom, 
rebellion, and the value of ingenuous emotion as contrasted 
with intellectual cunning. In Coleridge's second play, writ- 
ten eighteen years later, there is much less of the romantic 
mood, or at least it is the romanticism of Shakespere instead 
of that of the School of Terror. Shakesperian influence, in- 
deed, is apparent in individual passages of the earlier play, but 
in " Zapolya " the whole plot is avowedly based in large meas- 
ure on the " Winter's Tale," and the characters are in great 
part derived from that play and from " Cymbeline." In clear- 
ness of motivation " Zapolya " marks an advance over " Re- 
morse," but here as elsewhere in Coleridge's later work we 
find a certain perfunctoriness and half-heartedness which leaves 
both the characters and the situations incomplete and in- 
effectual. 

1 Campbell, p. 191. 



44 

Keats's single finished play, " Otho the Great," can be con- 
sidered as only in part representative of his dramatic ideals. 
It was written in the summer of 1819, by Keats and Charles 
Brown in collaboration, Brown furnishing the plot, and Keats 
writing out each scene as it was described to him, without 
knowing what was to follow. The plot proved to be of the 
conventional romantic type with medieval setting, complicated 
love intrigue, and the usual intellectual monsters of villainy ; 
the characters were thoroughly unnatural and the situations 
hopelessly improbable. When the fifth act was reached, Keats 
rebelled, and insisted upon finishing the drama in his own way. 1 
But it was too late, then, to save it, and the only part of the 
work that is of value is the style, which, while too florid to 
be entirely dramatic, possesses Keats's usual richness of color 
and depth of tone. The play was accepted by Drury Lane with 
a promise of performance the next year — a promise which was 
not fulfilled. Immediately after finishing " Otho," Keats 
began a drama on the subject of King Stephen ; only about 170 
lines were finished, but in them we feel a martial vigor, and 
breathe the air of battle as we hardly do in any other play 
written since the days of Shakespere. Yet dramatically pow- 
erful as are the four individual scenes which we have, the 
drama was evidently to be constructed on the model of the 
Shakespere chronicle play, than which nothing could be much 
less adapted to the modern stage. There is little to show that 
Keats, any more than the other romanticists, realized the vital 
dependence of the drama upon the stage, or would have been 
willing to undergo the severe discipline of mastering stage 
requirements. 

Byron possessed more actual acquaintance with the theater 
and the contemporary drama than did any other of the romant- 
icists. In at least one year, 181 3, he had a box at Covent 
Garden for the entire season, 2 and during most of his residence 
in London until 181 6 he seems to have attended both theaters 
not infrequently. For a part of that time he was on the Sub- 
committee of Management at Drury Lane. In 18 14 (Feb- 

1 Keats, Poems, 1905, De Selincourt ed., p. 552. 

2 Moore, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron, 1830, i. 446. 



45 

ruary 20) he confided to his Journal : " I wish that I had a 
talent for the drama ; I would write a tragedy, now." 1 The 
next year he got so far as to write the first act of a play on 
the subject later used in " Werner," and the manuscript of this 
act shows from its stage directions that it was intended for 
production. After his social ostracism and abandonment of 
England, however, Byron's pride prevented him from taking 
any measures which would seem to cater to the public taste. 
His historical tragedies, " Marino Faliero," " Sardanapalus," 
" The Two Foscari," — attempted revivals of the aristocratic 
French classical drama, — and his romantic play " Werner," — 
one of the latest and best modifications of the terror type, — 
were alike prefaced with ostentatious denials of any stage inten- 
tion. Nevertheless, Byron's great literary popularity resulted in 
their all being put upon the stage, sooner or later, with varying 
theatrical success. " Marino Faliero " was put on by Cooper 
seven times in 1821 ; it was revived by Macready in 1842 and 
damned after two nights ; it was again revived, by Phelps, in 
1867, for a month and a half; as late as 1887, it was acted in 
Germany nineteen times by the " Meiningers." 2 " Sardanapa- 
lus " was played twenty-two times by Macready in 1834 ; it 
was revived by Charles Kean in the summer of 1853 ; in 1877 
it was made over into a grand spectacular play and performed 
at Manchester and Liverpool, the same adaptation being after- 
wards presented at Booth's Theater, New York ; a French 
tragedy in 1834, and a French opera in 1867 were also pro- 
duced upon the basis of Byron's drama. 3 " The Two Fos- 
cari " was performed by Macready in 1825, and again in 
1838. 4 " Werner " was first produced in England by Macready 
in 1830, although it had previously been given in 1826 by 
Barry at the Park Theater, New York ; thenceforth, it was 
one of the most successful plays in Macready's repertoire until 
his retirement in 1851. Since Macready, no one, so far as is 
known, has attempted it. 5 

1 Moore, i. 501. 

2 Byron, Works, 1901, iv. 324. 

3 Ibid., v. 2. 

* Ibid., v. 114. 
5 Ibid., v. 324. 



46 

These repeated performances certainly suggest that Byron's 
plays must have in them the stuff of which the genuine acted 
drama is made ; in spite of himself he attained in " Werner " 
a theatrical success that none of the other English poets of 
the century was able to equal. In contrast to the rest of the 
romanticists Byron possessed the volitional power necessary 
for the creation of great drama, and his plays do reveal some 
struggles of the will although these are almost lost sight of in 
the fullness of emotional expression. It is unfortunate that 
he should have attempted, under the influence of Alfieri, to 
revive the style of the classical drama, a type whose loftiness 
and ideal serenity were quite opposed to the restless fervor of 
his own nature. The vigor of romantic action was sacrificed 
in "Marino Faliero," " Sardanapalus," and " The Two Fos- 
cari," without gaining any compensating harmonies of struc- 
ture or characterization. Yet on the other hand, after the 
insincerity and extravagance of the other romanticists, one 
cannot but be pleased with the veracity and self-control of 
Byron's work. His substitution of the appeal to admiration of 
the heroic in place of the appeal to horror, of a genuine, if ideal- 
ized, historical setting in place of a mythical medievalism, and 
of large themes of imperial dignity in place of the conventional 
theme of love, all seem healthy and invigorating. In " Werner " 
Byron returned to the romantic play shorn of its worst arti- 
ficiality, and produced an exceedingly interesting drama of 
curiosity. In spite of uneven and inconsistent characterization, 
" Werner " is by far the most actable of his plays, although 
inferior to all of the others in literary merit. Had Byron 
devoted himself seriously to writing for the stage, one feels 
that he ought to have produced dramas of great permanent 
value, but he cherished, or at least affected to cherish, the 
notion that his plays would be sufficient unto themselves with- 
out the aid of representation. Their long speeches, irrelevant 
scenes, and leisurely developed plots mark them as ultimately 
closet dramas, and the result is that they are now fast dropping 
out of the knowledge of mankind. In this instance, as in all 
the others, we find high talents rendered non-effective dramat- 
ically, through simple ignorance of the stage and misconcep- 
tion of the nature of dramatic art. 



47 

How far was Shelley's case different from that of these 
contemporaries with whom he was in such close touch in his 
general achievement? Did he in any degree share their preju- 
dices against the stage ? Did his experience qualify him better 
for the work of a successful playwright? 

According to the concurrent testimony of Med win, Hogg, 
Peacock, and Mrs. Shelley, the actual acquaintance of Shelley 
with the contemporary acted drama must have been very 
slight. Medwin tells a story of a truant adventure of boy- 
hood when he and Shelley ran away from school at Brentford 
to see Mrs. Jordan in " The Country Girl" ; but he explicitly 
adds: "[Shelley] had no fondness for theatrical representa- 
tions ; and in London, afterwards, rarely went to the play." 1 
Of the Oxford period of Shelley's career Hogg says, " far 
from feeling a desire to visit the theaters, Shelley would have 
esteemed it a cruel infliction to have been compelled to witness 
performances that [even] less fastidious critics have deemed 
intolerable." 2 

In October 1814, Mrs. Shelley's Diary mentions attendance 
at a play which Shelley left after the second act. She goes 
on to record, apparently uttering his views as well as her own, 
"the extreme depravity and disgusting nature of the scene; 
the inefficacy of acting to encourage or maintain the delu- 
sion. — The loathsome sight of men personating characters 
which do not and cannot belong to them." The production 
which aroused all this disgust was Edmund Kean's " Hamlet." 3 
Peacock later attempted to take Shelley's education in hand on 
this matter, but in vain. He gives a humorous account of his 
luring Shelley to a performance of Sheridan's " School for 
Scandal," and of the indignant poet's attempt to leave in the 
middle of the play, insisting that it was written only to main- 
tain the superiority of profligacy and ignorance over thrift and 
learning. But Peacock did succeed in initiating his recalcitrant 
friend into the relatively simple mysteries of Italian opera, at 

1 Medwin, Life, i. 52. 

2 Hogg, Shelley at Oxford, New Monthly Magazine, October 1832. 
* Dowden, Life, i. 475. 



48 

which, particularly the operas of Mozart, Shelley was a fre- 
quent attendant during the seasons of 1817 and 181 8. 1 

In the latter year he also saw Miss O'Neil in the part of 
Bianca in Milman's " Fazio," and was greatly impressed by 
her acting. 2 Mrs. Shelley mentions his having seen Miss 
O'Neil several times, 3 and the Diary records attendance at the 
"Merchant of Venice" (probably Kean) February 11, 1817, 
" Bride of Abydos," February 21, 1818, "Castle of Glyndower," 
March 1, 1818, and an unnamed performance at Lyons, March 
23, 1818. 4 Shelley certainly must have seen enough of Kean's 
acting to modify his first dissatisfaction, since in a letter to 
Peacock at the time of " The Cenci " he mentions him in 
favorable terms. 5 By that time, he had also sufficiently recov- 
ered from his ideas as to the inferiority of the stage to be 
willing to write for it. 

In this desire to adapt his play to stage requirements, Shelley 
certainly shows a truer dramatic sense than Wordsworth or 
Byron, with their real or affected indifference to the pres- 
entation of their plays. On the other hand, he evidently had 
no natural love for the theater, and no great knowledge of the 
stage or the actor's art, — a knowledge which comes, not with 
ten or a dozen evenings at the theater, but only with the 
closest intercourse of years. In these respects, Shelley's equip- 
ment was considerably less than Byron's, and perhaps even 
less than that of the other closet dramatists. 

Hence, in the composition of " The Cenci," Shelley was nat- 
urally governed, not so much by the requirements of the actual 
stage for which he was writing, but of which he knew so little, 
as by the examples of the great Greek and Elizabethan dramas 
with which he was familiar. The degree of success attained 
by him is an illustration of the large amount of dramatic 

1 Peacock, Memoirs of P. B. Shelley, Fraser's Magazine, June 1858. 

2 Ibid. 

3 Shelley's Works, 1839 ed., vol. ii. p. 276. 

4 Dowden, Life, ii. 103, 184, 189. Genest fails to record the performance 
of the Merchant of Venice on the above date. He gives the date of the 
first and only performance of the Castle of Glyndower as March 2, not 
March 1 (Eng. Stage, 8: 642). 

6 Shelley to Peacock, July 1819 (Shelley's Works, Forman ed., viii. 113). 



49 

knowledge that may be gained from a literary acquaintance 
with the work of master dramatists, but at the same time it 
reveals the insufficiency of such an acquaintance. From his 
reading Shelley learned what should be the fundamental quali- 
ties of a good literary drama, but he did not learn what should 
be the fundamental qualities of a good stage play. Both of 
these facts will become evident through an analysis of the 
drama, dealing first with the details of structure, and then con- 
sidering the ultimate dramatic appeal of the play. 

Shelley made numerous changes in plot from the account 
given in his source. Propriety dictated several at the outset. 
Thus the crime for which Cenci is mulcted at the beginning 
of the play was changed from sodomy to murder, the descrip- 
tion of Cenci's relations with courtesans was omitted, and his 
attempt to persuade Beatrice to the incest was entirely ignored. 
In the source, Beatrice and Lucretia themselves draw out the 
nails which have been driven into Cenci's head, and themselves 
throw the body into the garden ; in the drama, the method of 
the murder was changed to strangling, and the office of dis- 
posing of the body was put into the hands of the murderers, 
Marzio and Olimpio. 

Other alterations were governed by Shelley's sense of tragic 
irony. In the source, Rocco is indeed slain while at the mass, 
but by a private enemy ; Shelley attributes his death to the 
falling of the church itself. In the source, we are merely 
told that Cristofero was assassinated by a surgeon ; in the 
drama, his representative with altered spelling, Cristofano, 

" Was stabbed in error by a jealous man, 
Whilst she he loved was sleeping with his rival." I. iii. 62-63. 

More noticeable still is Shelley's introduction in the fourth 
act of an order from the Pope for Cenci's execution, which 
comes just too late to prevent his murder. Here the desire 
for dramatic irony led Shelley to make use of an unmotivated 
act at variance with the whole conduct of the Pope throughout 
the rest of the play. 

The remaining changes consist in bringing closely together 
events that in the original narrative are widely separated as to 
time. The most important alteration of this kind appears in 
5 



50 

the events that follow upon the death of Cenci. In the source, 
the fact of murder is not suspected for some time, and Beatrice 
and Lucretia return to Rome with successfully feigned mourn- 
ing. It is only later, after a Petrella laundress has made a 
deposition concerning blood-stained sheets, that a commission 
sent to the castle examines Cenci's body, with the result that his 
wife and children are then taken into custody. Meanwhile, one 
of the murderers, Olimpio, has been secretly killed by order of 
Guerra (Orsino) ; but the other, Marzio, is now captured by 
the authorities, and confesses his crime, only to retract his con- 
fession on being confronted with Beatrice. Next ensue several 
months of quiet, while the Cenci are held in confinement await- 
ing further evidence. At the end of that time one of the 
hired assassins of Olimpio is captured, and indicates Guerra 
(Orsino) as his employer. The latter escapes from Rome in 
disguise, but thereby throws renewed suspicion upon the 
family of the Cenci, who are now put to the torture, and, with 
the exception of Beatrice, confess the murder. Bernardo, who 
was really not involved in the crime, is pardoned ; but, in spite 
of the appeals of advocates and nobles, Beatrice, Lucretia and 
Giacomo are condemned and executed. Thus, in the source 
there are two long intermissions of time, one immediately after 
the murder, the other after Marzio's recantation. 

Both of these interruptions to the narrative were skillfully 
avoided by Shelley, who, in the first instance, probably with 
" Macbeth " in mind, placed the discovery of the murder imme- 
diately after its commission, and in the second did not permit 
the recantation of Marzio to give the prisoners more than a 
few hours' respite. 

Thus, through these changes, Shelley was enabled to con- 
dense the events of more than a year into a very few days. As 
to the more minute indications of these days, he seems to have 
been somewhat indifferent, and his references are not alto- 
gether consistent. The first two acts clearly enough occur on 
successive days. At the end of the first scene of the first act 
the messenger from Salamanca arrives with the news of the 
death of Cenci's sons which gives the occasion for the banquet. 
In the same scene Cenci gives the order for Beatrice to attend 



51 

him at midnight. Before this midnight meeting there inter- 
vene the two scenes of Beatrice's conversation with Orsino 
and the quarrel at the banquet. That the first scene of the 
second act occurs on the following day is made plain by Cenci's 
statement : 

Why, yesternight you dared to look 

With disobedient insolence upon me, II. i. 106-7. 

But at this point we meet with a difficulty. Further on in 
the same scene Cenci says : 

On Wednesday next I shall set out : you know 

That savage rock, the castle of Petrella : II. i. 167-68. 

The phraseology seems to imply that Wednesday is at least 
several days off, and not the next day. At the end of the same 
scene Cenci soliloquizes in a way that shows he is about to 
execute his incestuous design, and the first scene of the next 
act introduces Beatrice immediately after the violation has 
occurred, seemingly that same day. Yet in this scene Lucretia 
says : 

Tomorrow before dawn, 

Cenci will take us to that lonely rock, 

Petrella, in the Apulian Apennines. III. i. 238-40. 

This seems inconsistent with Cenci's statement earlier on the 
same day that they would set out on " Wednesday next." 
Furthermore in an intervening scene Camillo speaks of " that 
impious feast the other night" (II. ii. 29), whereas the 
first scenes of the second and third acts both take place the 
very next day after the feast. It is clear that Shelley never 
took the trouble to determine in his own mind just when the 
banquet and the outrage had actually taken place. From this 
point, however, the scenes proceed onward without difficulty, 
the meeting of Orsino and Giacomo occurring at two o'clock 
on the morning of Thursday (III. ii. 24), the murder of Cenci 
at midnight on Thursday (III. ii. 74-5; IV. ii. 1), and the 
capture of Giacomo and escape of Orsino sometime on Friday 
(V. i. 72). There is a brief indefinite intermission after this 
before the trial, which with the ensuing torture of Beatrice 
occupies one day (V. ii. 192). The next day (V. iii. 4) brings 



52 

the torture of Lucretia and Giacomo and their confession. 
After another short indefinite intermission the final sentence 
is given. 

The inconsistencies that appear in regard to the details of 
time, while characteristic of Shelley, do not really obscure the 
course of the drama, and it should be remembered that even 
Shakespere sometimes nods in like manner. 1 The more im- 
portant fact to be noted is that Shelley, although he did not ob- 
serve unity of time in the strict sense, or with any such fidelity 
as Byron chose to exercise in his classical plays, nevertheless 
did compress the events of his plot into about as brief a 
compass as could be done with plausibility. 

In regard to the placing of his scenes, it is quite otherwise. 
Here the influence of Shakespere was perilously paramount 
with Shelley as with the other romanticists, all of whom 
tended to pile up scene upon scene without sufficiently realiz- 
ing that the introduction of the front curtain and set pieces of 
scenery had interfered with the uninterrupted shifting of 
scenes possible on the open Shakesperian stage. To be sure 
Coleridge in his " Zapolya " restricted himself to six scenes 
(excluding the Prologue), and Byron in " Sardanapalus " and 
" The Two Foscari " limited himself to six and five, but in 
" Remorse " Coleridge employed ten, and in " Marino Faliero " 
and in " Werner " Byron used twelve and nine respectively. 
Maturin's " Bertram " and " Manuel " have fourteen and 
fifteen scenes, and Wordsworth's " Borderers " has seventeen. 
Shelley in " The Cenci " stands well up among the leaders with 
fifteen, but it should be added in his defense that none of his 
changes of scene are quite so insignificant and needless as 
some of those in the plays of the other writers mentioned. It 
is plain, however, that he had little conception of the value 
of restriction in this matter, since several of the scenes could 
have been easily combined, particularly the first and second 
scenes of the first act and the second, third, and fourth scenes 
of the fourth act. 

1 Compare the time sequence of Othello, the statements as to the age of 
the hero in Hamlet, and the duration of the sleeping potion in Romeo 
and Juliet. 



53 

Similarly to Shakesperian influence, perpetuated on the acting 
stage of the day, must be ascribed the profuse employment of 
that dangerous device, the soliloquy. All of the romanticists 
were especially fond of the alluring capacity of the soliloquy 
to express subjective feeling. Wordsworth and Shelley, fol- 
lowing Shakespere's example in " Othello," repeatedly use it 
to divulge to the audience the hidden plots and dark emotions 
of their favorite villains. In " The Borderers " there are nine 
soliloquies, of which five, and those the longest, come from the 
mouth of the mysterious and treacherous Oswald. In " The 
Cenci " there are twelve, of which six belong to Cenci, and 
four to Orsino. The other romanticists use the device with 
about equal frequency. Most of the soliloquies of Byron and 
Shelley are somewhat longer than those of Wordsworth and 
Coleridge, but all are sufficiently long to be displeasing to our 
modern feeling accustomed to more artistic means of exposi- 
tion through dialogue as developed by Ibsen and his followers. 
It should always be borne in mind, however, that the soliloquy 
in these romantic dramas of the early nineteenth century is 
neither of greater length nor more frequent employment than 
in the tragedies of Shakespere, 1 and that there is no such tech- 
nical modern stage objection to it as arises in the case of an 
overplus of scenes. We do not like the soliloquy, to-day, but 
the Elizabethan and the Romantic poets did like it, and we are 
hardly justified in considering its use as in itself an artistic 
defect. Of course, if the soliloquy be regarded as an actual 
talking to one's self aloud, it is absurd enough. In real life 
only children do that. Shelley was apparently aware of this 
often urged objection, for he seems to attempt a refutation of 
it in Cenci's soliloquy : 

I think they cannot hear me at that door. 

What if they should? And yet I need not speak, 

Though the heart triumphs with itself in words. I. i. 138-40. 

This shows, however, that Shelley himself regarded the 
soliloquy as a form of actual speech instead of as a merely 
symbolic means of making known to us unspoken and con- 

1 There are in Macbeth seven soliloquies, in Lear nine, in Hamlet and 
Othello ten each. 



54 

cealed feelings that could not otherwise be made manifest. 
Here he was assuredly on the wrong track. Not because it is 
natural for the over- full heart to " triumph with itself in 
words " is the soliloquy of service, but because there is no other 
possible way of expressing such secret emotions and ideas as 
the speaker would not be willing to communicate to any other 
character in the play. Herein, and herein alone, lies its real 
justification. Whatever expository purpose may be served 
must be incidental, if we are not to be hopelessly repelled. To 
utilize the soliloquy merely for the purpose of giving knowl- 
edge of certain facts to the audience is simply a crass kind of 
exposition due to dramatic indolence or incapacity. Shelley, 
with all his fondness for the device, never quite demeans it to 
this lower level, for he utilizes its expository function only in 
connection with the self-counsel and passionate planning nat- 
ural to such characters as Cenci and Orsino. 

In determining the nature of the stage effects which Shelley 
desired, the influence of Elizabethan drama was again domi- 
nant and this time more propitiously. The likeness of some of 
the situations in " The Cenci " to Shakesperian originals has 
long been perceived, and it is here hardly necessary to do more 
than mention them. The most striking series of parallels 
occurs in the murder scene, which was undoubtedly written 
with " Macbeth " in mind, though perhaps unconsciously. 1 
Even here, however, to speak of Shelley's treatment as a 
plagiarism, as some writers have done, seems to me hardly 
justifiable. The interrupted banquet scene in " Macbeth " may 
also have given Shelley the first suggestion for his own ban- 
quet scene in the first act, which, however, he works out in a 
typically romantic manner in the contrast between the blood- 
curdling speeches of the father over his sons' deaths and the 
eloquent rhetorical entreaty of the suffering and innocent 
daughter. From " Lear " Shelley clearly obtained the idea of 
Cenci's terrible curse upon his daughter, 2 and from " Othello " 
the kernel of Giacomo's long comparison of the dying lamp to 

1 Cf. Macbeth II. ii. 10-20, and The Cenci IV. iii. 5-22. 
3 Cf. Lear I. iv. 297-311, and The Cenci IV. i. 114-157. 



55 

his father's life. 1 There are numerous other parallelisms to 
Shakespere, 2 but these are the most important. 

From Middleton's " Changeling " I think that Shelley may 
have derived Orsino's plan to obtain control over Beatrice 
through her murder of Cenci, a plan which bears close simi- 
larity to the blackmailing methods of De Flores in Middleton's 
play. The trial scene of " The Cenci " resembles the trial of 
Vittoria Corrombona in Webster's " White Devil " in that in 
each case a woman who is guilty of the crime charged against 
her nevertheless holds the sympathy of the audience through 
her own sheer courage and the unfair methods of her accusers. 

The two prison scenes of " The Cenci " were probably 
influenced by two similar scenes in Milman's contemporary 
drama, " Fazio," one of the plays which Shelley saw acted in 
1818. In the first of these scenes, Fazio, who is condemned 
to death, is visited in prison by his wife, Bianca, and the two 
indulge in pathetic reminiscences comparable in spirit to the 
prison dialogue of Bernardo and Beatrice ; Bianca then leaves 
her husband in order to make one last attempt to obtain a 
pardon for him in the same manner as, with Shelley, Bernardo 
makes a last appeal on behalf of his family to the Pope ; in 
the next scene, Fazio is again visited by Bianca before his 
execution, but an officer enters to drag her away, just as, with 
Shelley, the judge commands Bernardo to be separated from 
Beatrice. It is interesting to note, however, that in Milman's 
play the officer sentimentally yields to Bianca's entreaty, and 
allows her to remain, while in " The Cenci " Bernardo's appeal, 
" Oh, would ye divide body from soul ? " only calls forth in 
reply the horrifying jest : " That is the headman's business." 

More important than the sources of influence upon particular 
scenes in " The Cenci " is the question of its dramatic struc- 

1 Cf. Othello V. ii. 7-13, and The Cenci III. ii. 11-18, 51-53. 

2 Cf. Hamlet I. iii. 78-80, and Cenci IV. iv. 40-41 ; King John IV. ii. 
220-41 and Cenci V. i. 19-24; Lear I. i. 124 and Cenci IV. i. 173-4; Lear 
I. v. 50 and Cenci V. iv. 56-57 ; Lear II. iv. 283-5 and Cenci III. i. 86-89 ; 
Measure for Measure III. i. 118-32 and Cenci V. iv. 47-75; Merchant of 
Venice IV. i. 71-80 and Cenci V. iv. 101-109 ; Othello V. ii. 303-4 and 
Cenci V. iii. 88-89; Richard III. IV. iv. 168-71 and Cenci I. iii. 173-175; 
Twelfth Night II. iv. 43-9 and Cenci V. iii. 123-7. 



56 

ture as a whole. Here Shakespere in " Othello " furnished 
the indirect model of a double character play in which 
the hero is relatively passive at the outset and is gradually 
roused to tragic action by the attacks of the villain ; in " Mac- 
beth," on the other hand, there existed the model of the type 
in which the hero is active at the outset, and spends his later 
force in trying to overcome the numerous enemies aroused by 
his own act. The early part of " The Cenci " conforms to the 
type of " Othello," the heroes in both cases remaining passive 
while the action is developed through the machinations of the 
villains ; the latter part conforms to the type of " Macbeth," 
the hero in each case coming to the front in the murder scene, 
and thenceforward struggling against the increasing reaction 
of society. 

At this point in our discussion we take leave of the likeness 
between " The Cenci " and the Elizabethan drama. The deter- 
mining characteristic of the latter is Action, the determining 
characteristic of " The Cenci " is Speech. Shelley is so much 
more interested in what his characters feel and say than in 
what they do, that each situation in his play tends to be self- 
sufficient, existing for the sake of the emotions and the poetry 
which it in itself suggests, instead of as a rightly subordinated 
part of the total plot. 

The individual speeches in " The Cenci " are much longer 
than those in the closet dramas of the contemporary romanti- 
cists, not to mention the Elizabethans. Byron's characters are 
sufficiently copious in utterance, but they yield to Shelley's. 
The speeches in Coleridge's " Remorse " and " Zapolya " are 
somewhat shorter than those in " The Cenci," and the speeches 
in Wordsworth " Borderers " and Keats's " Otho the Great " 
are shorter still. Thus from this point of view, and it is an 
important one, " The Cenci," instead of being the best adapted 
to the modern stage of any of these romantic plays, is really 
the least so. When we compare it in this respect with Eliza- 
bethan plays, the difference is still more striking. In place of 
the terse and flashing dialogue of Shakespere and his contem- 
poraries, we have in " The Cenci " frequent passages of decla- 



57 

mation similar to those in classic tragedy. 1 This tendency 
toward long individual speeches was probably chiefly due to 
the influence of those plays which on the whole formed 
Shelley's most constant literary study throughout mature life — 
the works of Aeschylus and Sophocles. The plays of Calderon, 
which he was beginning to study at the time of the composition 
of " The Cenci," may well have exercised a subordinate influ- 
ence in the same direction. 

The structure of Shelley's scenes, also, exclusive of the 
special instances of the banquet, murder, and trial, is more 
Greek than Elizabethan. His usual scene consists either of a 
dialogue between two persons, or of a succession of such dia- 
logues with changed speakers. It is rare for more than two 
people to be upon the stage at once. Thus act I. scene i. is a 
dialogue between Cenci and Camillo ; act I. scene ii., between 
Beatrice and Orsino ; act II. scene i., first between Lucretia 
and Beatrice, then between Lucretia and Cenci; act II. scene 
ii., between Camillo and Giacomo, then Giacomo and Orsino ; 
act III. scene i., first third between Lucretia and Beatrice, last 
third between Orsino and Giacomo; act IV. scene i., between 
Lucretia and Cenci ; act V. scene i., between Giacomo and 
Orsino ; act V. scene iii., first half between Bernardo and 
Beatrice ; act V. scene iv., first half between Camillo and Ber- 
nardo. Such scenes of dialogue between two persons are, of 
course, frequent in the Greek drama, although there, even 
omitting the possibility of unnamed attendants, the constant 
presence of the chorus in the foreground would have given 
these scenes a very different effect from that of the unpic- 
turesque and monotonous usage in " The Cenci." 

1 A comparison of the length of all the speeches (exclusive of the 
choruses) in Aeschylus's Agamemnon, Sophocles's Antigone, Euripides's 
Alcestis, Seneca's Hippolytus, Corneille's Cid, Racine's Phedre, and Shake- 
spere's Hamlet (selected because its speeches are unusually long for Shake- 
spere) yields the fact that of all these dramas only Seneca's and Racine's 
contain on the average as long speeches as Shelley's. The average length 
of the speeches in Euripides and Shakespere is about three lines; in 
Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Corneille four lines ; in Shelley five lines. The 
number of speeches extending over ten lines in proportion to the total 
number are : in Shakespere 5 per cent., in Euripides 6 per cent., in Sopho- 
cles 8 per cent., in Corneille 11 per cent., in Aeschylus 13 per cent., in 
Shelley 16 per cent., in Racine 17 per cent., in Seneca 19 per cent. 



58 

Some of the reviewers in 1886 spoke of Shelley's drama as 
episodic in character, but this is not correct. There is no sub- 
plot of importance, and all the scenes bear upon the central 
situation. Yet it undoubtedly produces an effect somewhat 
similar to the slow movement of an episodic drama, because 
Shelley uses his scenes primarily to express the emotions of the 
characters instead of to advance the dramatic action. An 
analysis of the early part of the play in this regard will make 
the point clearer. 

The first act is mainly taken up with setting forth the per- 
sonality of the chief figures, and, considering that it is an 
introductory act, this is needed and is well managed. The first 
scene shows us Cenci in his cruel power, the second shows us 
Beatrice in her helpless purity, the third brings the protago- 
nists together, and makes plain the unflinching character of 
each. After the banquet scene no one could doubt that there 
was to be a struggle to the death between the father and the 
daughter. 

The only criticism to be passed upon the first act from the 
structural point of view is that the purposes of the characters 
are shown to us all too fully. This is an important criticism, 
however, especially in one particular respect. In the very first 
scene Cenci's criminal determination is revealed as already fully 
matured. Shelley thus cuts himself off at the outset from the 
possibility of showing any great development in the character 
of Cenci or in the main situation. Instead of making the first 
part of the play lead up to Cenci's purpose as the final 
result of his exasperated and accumulating hate, Shelley allows 
all the early scenes to circle fatuously about the subject of the 
unaccomplished but already planned act of incest. 

In the second act the nature of this subject causes insur- 
mountable difficulty in the matter of structure. The Eliza- 
bethans, sure of the frank sympathy of their audience, were 
able to trace the development of incestuous deeds with an open- 
ness impossible for Shelley, whose desire not to emphasize the 
repulsive details of his plot leads to an obscurity which really 
emphasizes them all the more. After the last speech of Cenci 



59 

in the first scene, 1 we expect the incest to occur between the 
first and second acts, and it is some time after Beatrice's 
appearance in the second act before we learn that the hideous 
deed has not already been accomplished. Our uncertainty 
tends to make the idea of the incest all the more prominent. 
The end of this scene leaves the relation between Beatrice and 
her father essentially what it was at the beginning, so that the 
entire scene might have been omitted without the slightest 
detriment to the action of the drama. 

So, too, the second scene of this act adds nothing essential. 
It introduces and unfolds the character of the tiresome Giacomo, 
and it shows the thought of the murder in its first occurrence 
both to him and to Orsino, but these things could have been 
done equally well and in much shorter space later on. Like 
the first scene of this act the second also could be omitted 
without injury to the play as a whole. 

The third act is, in its first scene, of far greater merit. Of 
course the momentary madness of Beatrice owes its inception 
to the general tradition of the Elizabethan and late eighteenth 
century drama in both of which characters very frequently 
become mad under the stress of tragic suffering ; but, on the 
whole, with the exception of one or two over-subtle passages, 2 
it is thoroughly convincing, and would seemingly make a pow- 
erful theatrical appeal. Toward the end of the same scene, 
however, thirty-six lines are sacrificed to the thoroughly un- 
convincing and dramatically needless tale of Cenci's malicious 
endeavor to break up the domestic happiness of Giacomo and 
his family. Had not Giacomo already been introduced earlier, 

1 1, i. 146-47. 

Bid Beatrice attend me in her chamber 
This evening: no, at midnight and alone. 

■in. i. 19-23: 

I cannot pluck it from me, for it glues 
My fingers and my limbs to one another, 
And eats into my sinews, and dissolves 
My flesh to a pollution, poisoning 
The subtle, pure, and inmost spirit of life ! 
III. i. 36-8. Like Parricide . . . 

Misery has killed its father: yet its father 
Never like mine — O, God ! What thing am I ? 



60 

this story would be of service to explain his hatred towards his 
father, but after the second scene of the second act has just 
been devoted to this very purpose, further enforcement of the 
motivation in so minor a character is superfluous. 

In the second scene of the third act the characterizing mo- 
tive is reintroduced, this time to depict Giacomo's vacillating 
remorse over the supposed assassination of his father on the 
road to Petrella. It contains a number of fine passages, and 
in the reading is effective, but would not be likely to be so on 
the stage. 

The analysis has been sufficient to show where Shelley's 
chief interest lay. Like the other romanticists he tended to 
construct situations to exploit the emotions of his characters, 
instead of developing situation and characters hand in hand. 
The same lack of interest in pure narrative and inability to 
handle elements of plot which appear in all of Shelley's other 
long works appear also, though less openly, in "The Cenci." 

From all these facts it should be sufficiently clear what an- 
swer must be given to the question, how far is " The Cenci " 
an acting drama ? As a whole it is not an acting drama at all. 
A play, one of whose acts fails to advance the plot in the least, 
ten of whose scenes are purely conversational and without 
action, and four-fifths of whose speeches are of impossible 
length, is surely not to be called an acting drama. In all these 
respects " The Cenci " is less adapted to the modern stage than 
were Coleridge's " Remorse " and " Zapolya " or Byron's " Sar- 
danapalus " and " Werner " among its literary rivals. 

Yet I think no one who loves the theater can accept a nega- 
tive answer as to the ultimate stage fitness of " The Cenci " 
without regret. The histrionic opportunities in parts of the 
play are remarkable. In the banquet scene, the scene after the 
violation, the scenes of the murder and its discovery, and in 
parts of the prison scenes, opportunities are afforded for acting 
of the very highest order. The production of the play in 1886 
proved this, if nothing else, for it caused Miss Alma Murray 
to spring at once from comparative obscurity to the front rank 
of English actresses. Nothing but the almost complete lack 
of histrionic opportunity in the rest of the play could justify 
the loss to the stage of the great possibilities in these scenes. 



61 

But admitting that " The Cenci," as a whole, is not in any 
sense an actable play, does aught remain to be said in its behalf 
from the dramatic point of view? Yes, a great deal. Not 
only does the fact that Shelley was unable to adapt the first 
play which he wrote to stage conditions with which he was 
unfamiliar fail to prove that he was altogether lacking in fun- 
damental dramatic power ; it does not even prove that this par- 
ticular play was altogether lacking in that power. The acted 
drama is so complex an art that many other elements are 
required besides the fundamentally dramatic element. The 
characteristics which we have been thus far discussing, a clearly 
developed plot, a consistency of structure, and a brevity of 
speech, are required in a modern stage drama, but they are 
not the essentially dramatic requisites. The two requirements 
which finally determine that a play is ultimately dramatic and 
which best differentiate the drama from other forms of litera- 
ture are, that it present a struggle of the human will, and that 
it show forth in action the supreme moments of this struggle. 

A struggle of the human will " The Cenci " certainly has, a 
struggle more direct and more powerful than is to be found in 
any of its literary rivals of the century. From the opening of 
the first act to the conclusion of the last, the conflict of Beatrice 
is waged, at the beginning against the consummation of her 
father's horrible designs, at the end against the legacy of 
judicial vengeance resulting from his murder. It is a conflict 
in which the combatants on each side are well matched, and in 
which the results at stake are of tragic importance. In it the 
force of the protagonists is shattered ; and they drag down the 
lesser characters with them in their ruin. 

Furthermore, although Shelley is unable to portray the devel- 
opment of this situation consecutively, he does emphasize in a 
true dramatic manner the supreme moments of the struggle. 
There are five of these supreme moments : the violation, the 
murder, the discovery, the trial, and the condemnation. The 
first, Shelley comes as near as possible to representing, since 
he brings Beatrice on the stage immediately after the violation, 
so that we see the result of Cenci's act upon her will, first stun- 
ning her, then rousing her to the determination to take justice 



62 

and expiation into her own hands. This is the essential ele- 
ment of the climax, and the one in which we are interested ; not 
the violation itself, which was a mere act of physical force, but 
its effect upon the will and the character of Beatrice, is of 
importance. Out of a very delicate situation Shelley con- 
structed a scene unobjectionable on the score of propriety, and 
effective as a dramatic climax. All the other turning- points 
in the plot are actually shown to us upon the stage, save the 
murder of Cenci, which is committed just behind it, and obtains 
full dramatic value through the coming and going of the mur- 
derers before our eyes. 

Shelley was also successful in still a third important and 
more technical duty of the dramatist: exposition of the events 
preceding the opening of the play. Not a few dramas have 
been wrecked at the very outset upon this sheer obstacle of 
inanimate facts that in some way must be communicated 
through a dialogue full of life and imagination. In "The 
Cenci " the information which it is necessary for us to receive 
is unfolded in the course of plausible conversation or impas- 
sioned soliloquy. Thus, in the first scene, the dialogue between 
Cenci and Camillo makes plain the relation existing between 
the Count and the Papacy ; the reproaches of Camillo bring 
out the fact of Cenci's tyranny over his own family; after 
Camillo's departure Cenci's angry self -communing upon his 
waning fortune reveals that he has sent his sons to Salamanca, 
" meaning if possible to starve them there." The conversation 
of Beatrice and Orsino, in the second scene, makes clear 
Orsino's position as the formerly accepted lover who, although 
he has broken off this relationship for the sake of preferment 
in the Church, still poses as an honorable friend ; his soliloquy 
makes evident, a little too baldly perhaps, his actual dishonor- 
able intentions. In the third scene, the death of Cenci's sons 
is revealed in his dramatic speech at the banquet, and the help- 
lessness of Beatrice's position is brought out when the guests 
refuse to rescue her from her father's power. We have the 
situation now clearly before us, and are ready for its develop- 
ment. The excellence of this exposition consists, first, in the 
fact that the information is not obtruded upon us in a forced 



or unnatural manner, but occurs as it would naturally arise in 
the speech or thought of the characters, and secondly, that it is 
not given as mere information but is wrapped round with its 
emotional significance. 

Thus, curiously enough, while " The Cenci " is lacking in all 
the secondary elements of a good play, it still possesses some 
of the more primary elements. A drama may succeed without 
being ultimately dramatic in character, a drama may fail and 
yet be ultimately dramatic. " The Cenci " belongs to the latter 
type. Shelley simply did not know enough about the stage to 
write a successful stage drama; he was not sufficiently a master 
of theatrical tools. He was also unfortunate in choosing a 
theme which, while, as he believed it to be, essentially dramatic, 
was nevertheless one which it would have taxed the genius of 
the most skillful playwright to present with entire success. 
Under the circumstances it is no wonder that Shelley was so 
far from overcoming all the difficulties in his way. 

The wonder rather is that, when all deductions are made, the 
play should still possess so great a fundamental dramatic 
power. Shelley proved himself able in this instance to seize 
upon a definite tragic situation, make it visible and vivid before 
our eyes, reiterate it, emphasize it, burn it into our conscious- 
ness, and fix it there permanently and ineffaceably. A great 
literary drama " The Cenci " remains after all, and one that 
will not be forgotten. Inadequate of structure as it is, and 
hampered by its subject-matter, with scenes of declamation 
where scenes of action are needed, and scenes of action without 
proper relation to those which precede or follow, now too lin- 
gering in its movement, now too hasty, now belonging to one 
type of play, now to another, too voluble for the stage, too 
realistic for the closet, — when all these faults have been realized 
and inscribed in our thought, there still remains on the other 
side the clear consciousness of a great dramatic struggle, shown 
to us in its essential human significance, an exhibition of the 
basest and loftiest characteristics of mankind. 



VII 
Characterization 

The treatment of the characters in Shelley's drama was gov- 
erned by his fundamental ethical conception of the situation. 1 
At the end of his dedication of the play to Leigh Hunt there 
occurs this significant sentence : " In that patient and irrecon- 
cilable enmity with domestic and political tyranny and impos- 
ture which the tenor of your life has illustrated, and which, 
had I health and talents, should illustrate mine, let us, com- 
forting each other in our task, live and die." This shows 
clearly that in the realism of " The Cenci " Shelley had not at 
all forgotten his ethical interests and revolutionary sympathies. 
Although he supposed that he had laid these aside in the com- 
position of the play, he had not really done so. On the con- 
trary, the main theme was primarily congenial to him just 
because it presented in new circumstances a vivid concrete pic- 
ture of the very conditions under which he normally envisaged 
life: i. e., domestic, political, and religious tyranny physically 
all powerful, but spiritually conquered by their innocent vic- 
tims. The fact that the victim in this instance was a woman, 
and that she stood alone against the world made an added 
appeal to his ever-active chivalry. 

Sympathy with the oppressed was probably a more constant 
factor in Shelley's temperament than in that of any other 
English poet. It affected his work from the beginning, and 
created fixed forms for his imagined characters. From his 
first crude " Irishman's Song " at the age of seventeen, when 
he exhorted the defeated to rally and strike down the trium- 
phant oppressor, through the revolutionary poems of " Queen 
Mab" and "The Revolt of Islam," to the dramas of "Pro- 
metheus Unbound " and " The Cenci," the same conception of 

^he same thesis is developed, in a different manner, in Dr. Wagner's 
monograph, " Shelley's The Cenci," Rostock 1903. 

64 



65 

life is dominant. This conception views the world as divided 
into three great classes of men : the tyrants, composed mainly 
of kings and priests, oppressors of the rest of mankind ; the 
heroes, individual men and women arising from time to time 
as saviours of mankind ; and the slaves, the vast characterless 
mass who are oppressed by the tyrants or saved by the heroes. 
The idea that one man in his different relationships might 
belong at the same time to more than one of these three classes 
seems never to have occurred to Shelley. 

The enduring elements in his conception of the tyrant's char- 
acter were set forth by Shelley as early as 1811 when in 
" War," the first of the " Posthumous Fragments of Margaret 
Nicholson," he wrote : 

Ambition, Power, and Avarice now have hurled 

Death, Fate, and Ruin on a bleeding world. 1-2. 

These three, Ambition, Power, and Avarice, and a fourth, Pure 
Malice, are the most important characteristics of the kings in 
" Queen Mab " and " The Revolt of Islam " ; the despotic hus- 
band in " Rosalind and Helen " is characterized by Avarice and 
Fear ; Jupiter in " Prometheus Unbound," by Ambition, Power 
and Fear; Count Cenci in our drama by Power, Malice and 
Avarice. Of these characters Cenci by virtue of his fuller 
treatment is more complex than the others, but how little the 
essential conception varied may be seen from a passage, de- 
scriptive of the tyrant in " Queen Mab," which in spirit if not 
in details could be applied without change to Count Cenci. 

The king, the wearer of a gilded chain 

That binds his soul to abjectness, the fool 

Whom courtiers nickname monarch, whilst a slave 

Even to the basest appetites — that man 

Heeds not the shriek of penury ; he smiles 

At the deep curses which the destitute 

Mutter in secret, and a sullen joy 

Pervades his bloodless heart when thousands groan 

But for those morsels which his wantonness 

Wastes in un joyous revelry, to save 

All that they love from famine ; III. 30-40. 

In one respect and in one respect only is there an important 
difference of nature between Count Cenci and the earlier Shel- 
6 



66 

leyan impersonations of the despot. All of the others, like the 
king in "Queen Mab," are tainted with " abjectness; " that is, 
they are phantom figures without inherent strength of their 
own, who have been raised to positions of power by the sub- 
servience of the multitude, and are bound to vanish whenever 
this multitude shall assert its rights. Pure evil, unmixed with 
good, would be logically weak enough, and weak enough are 
its logical personifications in the earlier poems. The person- 
ality of Count Cenci is a much more substantial and convinc- 
ing incarnation of the evil principle, because Shelley combined 
with exclusively evil characteristics the qualities of courage, 
subtlety, self-sufficiency, and personal ascendancy which made 
a villain really worthy of the fight. 

To Shelley, tyranny and religious organization seemed always 
closely related. In "Queen Mab," "The Revolt of Islam," 
and "Rosalind and Helen," kings and priests are grouped 
together as allied oppressors of the world ; in " Prometheus 
Unbound," Jupiter represents at once the temporal and the 
spiritual power among the gods. So we should expect to find 
Count Cenci, Shelley's tyrant par excellence, depicted as a man 
of outwardly religious or at least superstitious temperament. 

This is exactly what we do find in the play, and it is in direct 
contradiction to the characterization in the source. The latter 
sums up Cenci's religious attitude as follows : " Sodomy was 
the least, and atheism the greatest of the vices of Francesco; 
as is proved by the tenor of his life ; for he was three times 
accused of sodomy, and paid the sum of 100,000 crowns to 
government in commutation of the punishment rightfully 
awarded to this crime : and concerning his religion, it is suffi- 
cient to state, that he never frequented any church ; and 
although he caused a small chapel dedicated to the apostle St. 
Thomas, to be built in the court of his palace, his intention in 
so doing was to bury there all his children, whom he cruelly 
hated." 

Count Cenci is pictured by Shelley, on the other hand, as a 
believing Roman Catholic. He takes pains always to obtain 
the Papal absolution for his misdeeds, and prayers to God are 
often on his lips. In the mad course of crime his perverted 



67 

faith gives him a sense of entire protection — for he finds the 
representatives of religion subservient to him in this life, and 
expects with confidence the same treatment from the Supreme 
Ruler in the next. As Cenci's sense of his own power rises, 
he feels more and more the closeness of his alliance with the 
Omnipotent. Drunk with the intoxication of command and 
the lust of sway he regards the least disobedience to his will as 
almost equally a crime against his divine co-worker. This 
sense of equality with the Most High reaches its climax in the 
magnificent blasphemy in the scene before the murder, when 
after Cenci's curse upon Beatrice, Lucretia says : 

For thine own sake unsay those dreadful words, 

When high God grants he punishes such prayers IV. i. 137-8. 

and Cenci, leaping to his feet, replies, 

He does his will, I mine. IV. i. 139. 

In the source, Cenci, sensualist and profligate, has little 
claim to loftiness of spirit ; in Shelley's hands, on the contrary, 
he becomes an idealist of superb proportions. In working out 
the character Shelley lent it his own courage in opposition to 
the prescripts of society, and borrowed for it the pride of the 
heroes in Byron's romantic poems. Cenci is at war with his 
fellow men ; he is conscious of the fact, and glories in it. Suffi- 
cient unto himself, he gains his delight from wantonly insult- 
ing public opinion and living a life of absolute personal 
freedom. 

In the monograph upon " The Cenci " by Dr. Wilhelm 
Wagner, there is pointed out an apparent similarity between 
the avaricious conduct of Cenci in refusing to support his sons, 
and the attitude of Timothy Shelley toward the poet. 1 The 
unpleasant idea that Shelley may have had his own father in 
mind in his creation of Count Cenci, " the wickedest man on 
record," as Landor calls him, cannot be absolutely denied, but 
the analogy, if it existed in his thoughts, was not suffered to 
influence materially his treatment of the character. Cenci's 
avarice is already fully developed in the Italian source, and in 
the drama is exhibited as one of many means for the exercise 

1 Wilhelm Wagner, " Shelley's ' The Cenci,' " p. 49. 



of a deep hatred of society much unlike anything in Timothy's 
shuffling disposition. Shelley had indeed a deep contempt for 
his father's stupidity and conservatism, but these characteristics 
do not appear in Cenci. The latter can surely be accounted 
for much better by the general nature of Shelley's beliefs than 
by any fancied resemblance to the respectable Member of 
Parliament from Horsham. 

The order of the priesthood is twice represented in " The 
Cenci," — in the persons of Orsino and Cardinal Camillo. The 
character of Orsino is altered from that in the source in accord- 
ance with Shelley's general attitude toward the clergy. In his 
tripartite division of mankind the priest is always numbered 
among the oppressors. " Queen Mab," " The Revolt of Islam," 
and " Rosalind and Helen," all picture him as an able minion 
of the tyrant, characterized chiefly by intolerance, hypocrisy, 
and treachery. So here, hypocrisy and treachery are made the 
chief characteristics of Orsino. Only the faintest suggestions 
of this temperament are to be found in the source, where the 
original of Orsino is described as follows : " The palace Cenci 
was sometimes visited by a Monsignore Guerra — a young man 
of handsome person and attractive manners, and of that facile 
character which might easily be induced to become a partner 
in any action good or evil as it might happen." Shelley delib- 
erately blackens this character. The dishonorable nature of 
Orsino's passion for Beatrice is not suggested in the source, 
which says simply : " he was somewhat in love with Beatrice." 
Nor is there any hint that he was a traitor to Beatrice as well 
as to Cenci ; on the contrary, the source explicitly says : " He 
was moved to a lively compassion of the state of Lucretia and 
Beatrice, who often related their increasing misery to him, and 
his pity was forever fed and augmented by some new tale of 
tyranny and cruelty." Also, Orsino's subtle insinuations, which 
play such a part in strengthening the half-formed designs of 
Giacomo and Beatrice, have no basis in the source. Thus the 
main lines of the character are due to Shelley alone. 

The other representative of ecclesiasticism, Cardinal Camillo, 
is treated a little less unfavorably. In fact, his is a more nearly 
objective picture of the priest than any which the poet had pre- 



viously drawn. Camillo's faults of subserviency and coward- 
ice, and his habitual refusal to face the real problems are con- 
temptible enough, but are far from the diabolical treachery of 
the Iberian priest in " The Revolt of Islam," or the frenzied 
bigotry of the churchman in " Queen Mab." He belongs rather 
to that type of the somewhat harmless clergyman so often 
ridiculed on the modern stage in plays of Ibsen, Jones, or 
Bernard Shaw : — the complacent conservative, who will hush 
up a scandal instead of destroying its cause, and who wishes 
above all things to maintain the existing order from which he 
derives his emoluments, but who is ready, nevertheless, to use 
such influence for good as he is able to exert without the 
slightest risk to himself. Camillo, even more than Orsino, is 
practically the creation of Shelley, as the only suggestions for 
such a figure in the source are the statements that, " The Pope, 
being informed of all that passed by Signor Ulysse Moraci, 
the judge employed in this affair, became suspicious that the 
beauty of Beatrice had softened the mind of this judge, and 
committed the cause to another;" and that after the defence 
by Beatrice's advocates, " Instead of retiring to rest, he [the 
Pope] spent the whole night in studying the cause with the 
Cardinal di San Marcello." Upon these two bare hints of a 
compassionate judge and a confidant of the Pope, Shelley 
elaborated the character of Camillo. 

Let us now turn to the representative of resistance to tyranny. 
This type of character, also, was conceived by Shelley at the 
very beginning of his missionary period in the cause of atheism 
and democracy. The same " Fragments of Margaret Nichol- 
son " of 1811 that denounced the tyrant, sang a fantastic epi- 
thalamium of Francis Ravaillac and Charlotte Corday, in terms 
whose crudeness should not disguise the fact that we have 
here the germs of the characters of Laon and Cythna, Lionel 
and Helen, Prometheus, and Beatrice Cenci. 

Yes, Francis ! thine was the dear knife that tore 
A tyrant's heart strings from his guilty breast ; 
Thine was the daring at a tyrant's gore 
To smile in triumph, to contemn the rest; 
And thine, loved glory of thy sex, to tear 
From its base shrine a despot's haughty soul, 



70 

To laugh at sorrow in secure despair, 

To mock, with smiles, life's lingering control, 

And triumph mid the griefs that round thy fate did roll. 51-59- 

From the first, Shelley associated men and women on an 
equality in the work of redeeming humanity from oppression, 
or if at any time he made distinction, it was the woman whom 
he seemed to consider the more important factor. He con- 
ceived of her neither as a household drudge nor as a social 
belle, but as the comrade of man, fighting by his side in the 
struggle for freedom. This idea that Woman's function is a 
public instead of a purely domestic one, — an idea that has 
steadily gained ground since Shelley's day, — was fundamental 
in his treatment of the type which we are here considering. 
His heroes, whether men or women, are hardly differentiated 
by qualities of sex at all. The personalities of Laon and 
Cythna, for example, might be transposed without altering the 
sex of either. Beatrice, feminine as she is, is feminine in 
qualities which she has in common with Shelley. In her as in 
all of his heroes of humanity, whether masculine or feminine, 
Shelley objectified and idealized himself. Dr. Wagner sug- 
gests that the personality of Beatrice is modelled in part upon 
that of Mary Godwin Shelley. 1 It may be that her "cold 
fidelity," clear judgment, and insight into character were taken 
over by the poet from his faithful wife, but the more important 
qualities of Beatrice — her courage, independence, gentleness, 
and poetic eloquence — spring unmistakably from the tempera- 
ment of the poet himself. 

So, too, the normal situation of Shelley's heroes was deter- 
mined by the circumstances of his own life. He was an unsuc- 
cessful reformer in an age of reaction when reform meant 
persecution, not success. His revolutionary heroes likewise 
are the victims of tyranny, and conquer spiritually only at the 
expense of physical defeat. Without exception, the touch- 
stone of their nobility is the endurance of suffering: they all 
wear the robes of martyrdom. Laon and Cythna, Lionel, Pro- 
metheus, and Beatrice, persecuted, insulted, tortured, find their 
highest triumph in the spiritual greatness which can bear the 
utmost spite of Fortune with patient steadfastness. 

1 Wilhelm Wagner, " Shelley's ' The Cenci,' " p. 40. 



71 

Of them all, the heroine of " The Cenci " is by far the most 
moving. Although her activity is narrower in scope than 
that of the others, and she befriends only her immediate family 
instead of whole nations, nevertheless she possesses the same 
qualities elsewhere assigned by Shelley to his saviours of the 
world. Her spiritual torments, however, are more intense 
than theirs, and the sympathy aroused by them is proportion- 
ately greater. Inasmuch as the moral significance of the 
drama mainly depends upon the understanding of her charac- 
ter, a somewhat detailed analysis of it may be pardoned here. 

The character is far from complex, although it seems so by 
contrast to the bare sketch in the source, whose suggestions 
were freely enlarged and altered by Shelley. As in the case 
of Count Cenci the most pronounced change is in respect to the 
religious attitude. Beatrice is pictured in the chronicle as a 
Roman Catholic of the most orthodox type. According to it 
she left 15,000 crowns in her will to the Fraternity of the 
Sacre Stimmate; on the night before the execution she passed 
considerable time in the recitation of psalms and prayers, and 
on the fatal morning she and Lucretia " confessed, heard mass, 
and received the holy communion." Her last words on the 
scaffold were : " Most beloved Jesus who, relinquishing thy 
divinity, becamest a man ; and did through love purge my sin- 
ful soul also of its original sin with thy precious blood ; deign, 
I beseech thee, to accept that which I am about to shed at thy 
most merciful tribunal, as a penalty which may cancel my 
many crimes and spare me a part of that punishment justly 
due to me." 

This conventional character was strikingly and subtly changed 
by Shelley. From the beginning, Beatrice is depicted as in- 
tensely religious, but her religion is hardly at any time that 
of a Roman Catholic. She prays to God and communes with 
him directly, finding no need for the interposition of saints, 
Virgin, or Jesus, whose names are never uttered. The reliance 
upon the ritual of litany, mass, and confession, so prominent 
in the Italian narrative, is entirely omitted by Shelley. The 
relation of Beatrice to the ecclesiastics Orsino and Cardinal 
Camillo is not the spiritually subordinate relation of a Roman 



72 

Catholic woman, however noble, to the prelates of her Church, 
but the English woman's relation of free equality. 

Beatrice looks for help not to the Church but to God Him- 
self. In the banquet scene of the first act she tells the assem- 
bled guests how she has 

. . . knelt down through the long sleepless nights, 

And lifted up to God the father of all, 

Passionate prayers: I. iii. 1 17-19. 

to be released from her dreadful situation. After Cenci's hor- 
rible crime she thinks of suicide, but repulses the thought 
because, 

Many might doubt there were a God above 

Who sees and permits evil, and so die ; 

That faith no agony shall obscure in me. III. i. 100-3. 

It is with a prayer to God that she retires to meditate upon the 
possibility of escape from the hideous degradation that has 
enfolded her: 

I pray thee, God, 

Let me not be bewildered while I judge III. i. 126-7. 

and it is with a belief in God's sanction that she determines 
upon just retribution : 

I have prayed 
To God, and I have talked with my own heart, 
And have unravelled my entangled will, 
And have at length determined what is right. III. i. 218-21. 

Thus Beatrice, like her father, identifies her cause with that of 
God, but where Cenci's God was a God of Power, hers is a 
God of Justice. The confidence that God will right her wrongs, 
and that the murder of her father is a sacred deed, upholds 
her. When the act is close at hand, she asks the murderers, 
confidently, 

Ye know it is a high and holy deed? IV. iii. 35. 

Immediately after it has been committed, she tells Marzio, 

Thou wert a weapon in the hand of God 

To a just use. IV. iii. S4-S- 

During these scenes of anguish when her soul has seemed 
to stand before God Himself asking His approval, the world's 



73 

probable opinion of her act has hardly occurred to Beatrice. 
With the coming of Savella immediately after the murder, she 
finds herself face to face with a new problem. Her act was a 
righteous act— this is her deepest faith — and the consciousness 
of her renewed purity makes life once more desirable; but 
against her suddenly arise men who call this holiest act of 
hers a crime. She has no reason to trust in justice at their 
hands; when has she ever seen them render justice? She is 
determined to believe that God approves her act ; if he does 
approve he cannot let her be punished for it; and yet in her 
heart she knows that if she acknowledges the act she will be 
punished, and God's justice will be mocked. She is accused 
of the murder of a father, but the man she killed was no father 
to her. If she be sentenced, injustice will have been proved 
more powerful than justice, Cenci more powerful than God. 
Not merely her own life but her faith in the moral order is at 
stake. If it but be vindicated, what matter a few more tortures 
of herself, or of Marzio, Lucretia, and Giacomo? 

Such was probably the underlying psychology of the situa- 
tion as it appealed to Shelley.' But he certainly did not suc- 
ceed in making this unusual psychology sufficiently clear to be 
at all manifest to an ordinary theatrical audience during the 
rapid progress of stage representation. The reviews of the 
performance of the play in 1886 show plainly that Beatrice's 
denial of her act completely alienated the sympathy of the 
critics, of whom there was none so poor to do her reverence 
after the trial scene. 

To a certain extent this view evidenced a sounder moral 
judgment than was shown in Shelley's conception of the char- 
acter. At best Beatrice's falsehoods are the result of a casuis- 
try far from fearless, and are inconsistent with the frank 
directness of her earlier acts. It is probable that Shelley 
hardly realized the existence of this inconsistency, since, like 
the nobler qualities of Beatrice, it is the reflection of an ele- 
ment in his own character. However much we may love and 
reverence the general nobility and purity of Shelley's per- 
sonality, it is vain to deny that he combined with an extra- 
ordinary love of abstract truth and readiness to suffer for it, 



74 

a considerable degree of laxity in his concrete practise. Who- 
ever is disposed to doubt this fact may be referred to the 
eighteenth chapter of " The Real Shelley " by John Cordy 
Jeaffreson, where that unamiable, but not unintelligent writer 
gives a long list of alleged falsehoods, only a part of which 
can possibly be explained away. 

Shelley's inaccuracies of statement, however, like Beatrice's, 
can usually be interpreted as having been in the interest of " a 
higher truth." His attitude on the subject is explicitly stated 
in his " Essay on Christianity," where, in defence of certain 
seeming insincerities of Jesus Christ, he says : 

" It is deeply to be lamented that a word should ever issue 
from human lips, which contains the minutest alloy of dissimu- 
lation, or hypocrisy, or exaggeration, or anything but the pre- 
cise and rigid image which is present to the mind and which 
ought to dictate the expression. But the practise of utter sin- 
cerity towards other men would avail to no good end, if they 
were incapable of practising it towards their own minds. In 
fact, truth cannot be communicated until it is perceived. The 
interests, therefore, of truth require that an orator should, as 
far as possible, produce in his hearers that state of mind on 
which alone his exhortations could fairly be contemplated and 
examined." 1 

This attitude explains Shelley's retention of Beatrice's false 
denial as given in the source when he changed her character 
and deeds in so many other respects. So keenly does he feel 
the injustice of her situation and her right to demand aid from 
God, that her insincerity toward the cruel world seems to him 
no evidence of any weakness of character. After the trial, as 
before, she retains her sense of perfect innocence and expecta- 
tion of God's help. Even after the final confession of the 
others of her family, Beatrice still clings to this hope and with 
it comforts them: 

The God who knew my wrong and made 

Our speedy act the angel of his wrath, 

Seems, and but seems, to have abandoned us. 

Let us not think that we shall die for this. V. iii. 1 13-16. 

1 Shelley's Works, Forman edition, vi. 360. 



75 

Her thought is entirely, be it observed, upon this world. If 
God's justice is not redeemed here, the stern logic of her life 
gives no reason for belief in its existence elsewhere. Hence 
when the news of the condemnation is received, her outburst 
of rebellion is inevitable. It is not primarily the unexpected 
reality of death, though this suddenly strikes chill upon her 
warm consciousness of youth, but it is the blank annihilation 
of all in which she trusted that causes her despair. For the 
first time she sees the universe in its soulless horror : 

No God, no Heaven, no Earth in the void world, 

The wide, grey, lampless, deep, unpeopled world. V. iv. 58-9. 

But her weakness is only momentary. Once more she rallies 
her spirit to endure to the end. In the consciousness of her 
own integrity she finds a last consolation. Although God has 
permitted even greater wrongs without intervention, although 
her faith in Him has at last grown cold, her sense of truth 
and right does not waver. She knows that she is innocent of 
guilt. A passionate sense of her justification moulds her final 
words to Bernardo : 

One thing more, my child, 
For thine own sake be constant to the love 
Thou bearest us ; and to the faith that I, 
Though wrapped in a strange cloud of crime and shame 
Lived ever holy and unstained. V. iv. 145-9. 

Where then is the " tragic error " without which some stu- 
dents of the drama will not be satisfied with the character? 
Shelley, probably familiar enough with this demand, points 
out in his preface that it was Beatrice's natural, but never- 
theless blameworthy, desire for revenge which made her a 
tragic character. But this desire for revenge is emphasized 
much more in the preface than in the drama. To be sure 
immediately after the outrage Beatrice does say : 

Aye, something must be done ; 

What, yet I know not . . . something which shall make 

The thing that I have suffered but a shadow 

In the dread lightning which avenges it. III. i. 86-9. 

And a little later she speaks of expiation (III. i. 151) and 
atonement (III. i. 215). It is not revenge of this past wrong, 



76 

however, but prevention of its else certain repetition that really 
dictates the murder. 

I pray thee, God, 
Let me not be bewildered while I judge. 
If I must live day after day, and keep 
These limbs, the unworthy temple of thy spirit, 
As a foul den from which what thou abhorrest 
May mock thee, unavenged. ... it shall not be III. i. 126-31. 



. . . lest I be reserved, day after day, 

To load with crimes an overburdened soul, 

And be . . . what ye can dream not. III. i. 216-18. 

After the death of Cenci it is not any expression of gratified 
revenge which we hear from Beatrice, but peaceful words of 
confidence in a world from which evil has at last been driven 
away. 

Let us retire to counterfeit deep rest ; 

I hardly need to counterfeit it now : 

The spirit which doth reign within these limbs 

Seems strangely undisturbed. I could even sleep 

Fearless and calm : all ill is surely past. IV. iii. 61-5. 

The feeling of the sympathetic reader of the drama in re- 
gard to the murder is well expressed by Swinburne i 1 " II y 
aura toujours, comme il y a toujours eu, des etres humains 
envers lesquels l'humanite n'a qu'un seul devoir : les supprimer, 
les exterminer, les aneantir; sinon de par la loi, de par l'arret 
de la conscience universelle. Ayant en elle cette foi profonde. 
Beatrice rend a l'enfer ce qui est a l'enfer — l'ame du comte 
Francesco Cenci." If this be true, Beatrice is fundamentally 
a pathetic character ; one who is driven to her deeds and death 
not by any inherent " tragic error " but by the sin of circum- 
stances. We do not find poetic justice operative in her case. 
The moral victory at the end of the play rests on no vindica- 
tion of the external order, but solely on the inner steadfastness 
of Beatrice. 

More has been made of the pessimistic side of this conclusion 
as expressing Shelley's personal conviction of the nature of 

1 The Cenci, Mme. Tola Dorian's translation with preface by A. C. Swin- 
burne, Paris 1883, p. xiii. 



77 

the world than the facts seem to warrant. The reviewers in 
his own day assumed of course that it was but another expres- 
sion of his early " atheism," and even so recent a critic as Pro- 
fessor Jack calls the speech of Beatrice on receiving the news 
of her condemnation the plainest utterance of Shelley's own 
religious despair. We must remember, however, that " The 
Cenci " was written immediately after the third act of " Pro- 
metheus Unbound " and only shortly before the fourth act, 
either of which might be called a plain utterance of Shelley's 
transcendental faith. But while Shelley had abandoned his 
youthful materialism, he had not yet come completely under 
the sway of the abstract Platonism which was later to govern 
his thought, and at this time his philosophy seems to have been 
rather indeterminate. Disbelieving in the existence of a per- 
sonal God, and probably intellectually agnostic as to the ques- 
tion whether there is any absolute moral government of the 
world, he still cherished an intense love of universal life. This 
took the place of a definite religion for him, and was equally 
consistent with moments of the most radiant hope or of the 
darkest doubt. Such a mental condition is not the least favor- 
able one for the composition of great literature, and it enabled 
Shelley to throw himself with equal sympathy into the raptures 
of Prometheus and the despair of Beatrice. 

The minor characters in " The Cenci " are of little impor- 
tance or interest and need no very long discussion. They 
belong to the great class of " Slaves," the passive victims or 
agents of oppression, representatives of that mass of mankind 
for which Shelley had large hopes in the future but little 
respect in the present. 

Lucretia, the chief of them, is an amiable, weak creature 
who moves through the play in a state of dignified helplessness. 
She is not animated by Beatrice's sense of the justice of their 
deed, and in vain tries to imitate the attitude of innocence. 
Her morality is not a matter of her own inner consciousness 
but of the external decrees of men. No intervention of God 
in their behalf is expected by her, and from the very fact that 
her religious sense is so much weaker than that of Beatrice it 
suffers from no shock of disillusionment. She attempts to 



78 

comfort Beatrice's despair by words of conventional consola- 
tion, and to the very end entirely fails to comprehend the real 
issues at stake. 

Giacomo is of the same type, but worse. He is a complain- 
ing figure, his soul filled with the sense of family wrongs, yet 
lacking the energy needful to right them. In him we see 
worked out Shelley's conception of the despicable nature of 
remorse. When told by Orsino of the discovery of the murder, 
Giacomo bursts out into loud wailings about its having been a 
" wicked thought " and " piteous deed," just as if the discovery 
of the deed had changed its nature. When his confession has 
destroyed his sister's chance of life, he is anew filled with 
remorse : 

Have I confessed ? Is it all over now ? 

No hope ! No refuge ! O, weak, wicked tongue 

Which hast destroyed me, would that thou hadst been 

Cut out and thrown to dogs first. To have killed 

My father first, and then betrayed my sister; V. iii. 96-100. 

In Beatrice's calm answer, we hear the utterance of one of 
Shelley's deepest convictions, expressed in many other places 
in his poetry : 

What 'twas weak to do, 

Tis weaker to lament once being done: 

Take cheer! V. iii. 111-13. 

The character of Bernardo is the least satisfactory creation 
in the play. In Shelley's translation of the source this son of 
Count Cenci is given as twenty-six years old. In the drama he 
is manifestly much younger, but Shelley appears never to have 
taken the trouble to determine just what his age was to be, for 
it seems to vary from scene to scene in accordance with the 
mood and situation. He is first introduced to us in the second 
act weeping because his father has struck Lucretia, and telling 
her how good a mother she has been to him. A few lines 
further on he declares that he will never leave her even though 
the Pope should permit him to live like others of his age " in 
some blithe place " " with sports, and delicate food and the 
fresh air." The speech is not a natural one for a boy of any 
age to have uttered, but taken in conjunction with the previous 



79 

weeping it does leave us with the impression of a mere child 
of overdeveloped sensibilities and cloistered delicacy. His next 
appearance is after the murder, when on being questioned by 
Savella whether he could name any who had an interest in 
Cenci's death, he replies : 

Alas! 
I can name none who had not, and those most 
Who most lament that such a deed is done ; 
My mother, and my sister, and myself. IV. iv. 67-70. 

Here the simple sincerity of the answer is childlike, but the 
antithesis of the expression is quite the reverse. And what 
shall we say of Bernardo's next speech, in the first prison 
scene of the fifth act, as he watches the sleeping Beatrice? 

How gently slumber rests upon her face, 

Like the last thoughts of some day sweetly spent 

Closing in night and dreams, and so prolonged. V. iii. 1-3. 

Yet a few minutes later he has resumed the simple thought and 
words of childhood when he asks Beatrice to confess : 

If indeed 
It can be true, say so, dear sister mine; 
And then the Pope will surely pardon you ; 
And all be well. V. iii. 57-60. 

In the last scene of the drama, on the other hand, he might be 
almost of an age with Beatrice : 

They come ! Let me 
Kiss those warm lips before their crimson leaves 
Are blighted . . . white . . . cold. Say farewell, before 
Death chokes that gentle voice ! O, let me hear 
You speak. V. iv. 137-41. 

Yet in spite of this vagueness and careless inconsistency in the 
characterization of Bernardo, the tenderness of the relationship 
between the brother and sister is made real and convincing. 
Shelley's conception of it may have been in part influenced by 
his memory of the early affection which had existed between 
himself and his sister Elizabeth. 

But on the whole the best that can be said of these minor 
characters is that they are barely adequate. The probability 
is that Shelley was not much interested in them, since they 



80 

involved no great spiritual issues, and that he deliberately 
threw all the main power of his inspiration upon the two 
chief characters, Beatrice and Cenci, feeling that in them lay 
the problem for him to solve. 

This problem, as we have seen, was not that of objective 
characterization, but of the realistic embodiment of certain 
abstract ideas. The remarkable earnestness of these ideas in 
Shelley's mind is nowhere better shown than in the success 
with which he here made them over into living human beings. 
Beatrice is surely an ennobling vision of maidenly purity and 
heroic courage. Cenci is surely a powerful incarnation of 
awful vice. No characters equally moving were produced by 
any other English dramatist of the century. Although they 
took their rise, not from observation of the complex workings 
of human life, but merely from the aspirations and fears of 
one intense soul, their validity is equal to the sincerity and 
power of that soul. 



VIII 
Style 

In writing " The Cenci," Shelley was confronted by two 
antithetic ideals of style, both of which he seems clearly to 
have recognized. On the one hand, he was writing a more 
realistic piece than he had before attempted, and his language 
needed to be clear and simple enough to represent the usual 
speech of men in a way to be immediately understood by an 
ordinary audience in the theater. On the other hand, in deal- 
ing with so repulsive a subject as that of " The Cenci " un- 
usual beauty of language was required to raise it to the poetic 
level. Thus the double necessity of realism and idealism, 
which confronts every artist in every work of art, presented 
itself here to Shelley in an accentuated form. That he per- 
ceived the need for idealization, the following statement from 
his preface makes plain : " The person who would treat such a 
subject must increase the ideal and diminish the actual horror 
of the events, so that the pleasure which arises from the poetry 
which exists in these tempestuous sufferings and crimes may 
mitigate the pain of the contemplation of the moral deformity 
from which they spring." He felt that this idealization could 
properly be accomplished in a drama only through the fusion 
of imagery and passion. " Imagination," he says in his preface, 
" is as the immortal God which should assume flesh for the 
redemption of mortal passion." To such passionate imagina- 
tion he seems chiefly to have trusted for the poetic effect of 
his drama. " In other respects," he continues, " I have written 
more carelessly ; that is, without an overfastidious and learned 
choice of words. In this respect I entirely agree with those 
modern critics who assert that in order to move men to true 
sympathy we must use the familiar language of men." 

As to Shelley's idealization of this style by means of imagery 
there has been question. The proper mean to be observed in 
7 81 



82 

a poetic drama between superfluity and paucity of imagery 
depends so largely upon personal taste that it is not surprising 
that Shelley has been attacked upon both scores. Thus Mr. 
John M. Robertson, as we have seen, 1 accuses Shelley of intro- 
ducing continually " the merest of mere poetry," and cites one 
instance in proof of his charge. On the other hand we find 
The Observer of May 9, 1886, saying, " Few indeed are the 
passages which, like Beatrice's noble descriptive speech at the 
beginning of the third act, make any attempt to relieve the 
gloom appropriate to monotonous infamy of the blackest type." 

These opposed opinions become more explicable when we 
consider the nature of Shelley's imagination, for most of his 
imagery in " The Cenci " is very little, if at all sensuous. 
It gives us no sense of the verity of the external world, 
and leaves no vivid concrete picture in our mind. Shel- 
ley's vocabulary was early moulded by his continual read- 
ing of philosophy, and his later slight accumulation of beau- 
tiful and concrete words never entirely superseded their prede- 
cessors. And even more fundamental than this philosophical 
diction is Shelley's temperamental preference for an intellectual 
conception rather than a concrete picture. Objects gained sig- 
nificance for him not so much when seen pictorially as when 
revealed in their inner relation to other objects. He never 
entirely lost the characteristics of a metaphysician who had 
turned poet, and his interest was always in ideas or emotions 
generated by ideas, rather than in sensations or emotions gen- 
erated by sensations. This concern with abstractions, this lack 
of sensuousness, is a fundamental artistic defect that of itself 
would serve to place Shelley's work forever on a lower plane 
than that of world poets of the type of Shakespere and Milton. 

Yet like most of the defects of great writers, this of Shelley's 
is one which we could ill afford to do without, for it is indis- 
solubly connected with one of his most characteristic merits. 
Owing to his passionately abstract nature and the intensity of 
emotion with which he regarded generic ideas, Shelley brought 
into the realm of poetry much that was before unknown there. 
No other modern English poet, not even Coleridge in his most 

1 Pp. 23-24. 



83 

philosophical period, has ever been so intensely interested in 
pure ideas, or has made them so strangely emotional. Imagery, 
without being picturesque, may still serve to elucidate some 
hidden and significant relationship of thought, or may exalt 
and universalize the feelings. Shelley's continually does both. 
Subtle correspondences between man and external nature are 
suggested, and each is interpreted in the light of the other. 
Emotions are lifted above the immediately personal plane, and 
are given a broader meaning by connection with larger facts 
of life. Thus we meet continually in Shelley's works the 
curious phenomenon of poetry that is not directly sensuous, but 
is, nevertheless, thoroughly impassioned. In " The Cenci " this 
stylistic peculiarity is especially frequent, owing to the subordi- 
nation of references to nature and the predominance of intel- 
lectual ideas. 

How far Shelley really attempted to relieve the gloom of the 
situation by the introduction of imaginative passages, and how 
far such passages are not intimately associated with the dra- 
matic passions of the characters can easily be determined. An 
enumeration of all the figurative passages in several sections of 
the play yields the result that, on the average, one in every 
three lines contains some imaginative coloring. 1 And in the 
vast majority of cases these figures are so fused with the emo- 
tion of the character that by no possible justice can they be 
called " mere poetry " as opposed to " dramatic poetry." In 
addition to the one instance cited by Mr. Robertson, I can find 
only three others in the entire play to which especial excep- 
tion could be taken on the score of their being dramatically 
irrelevant : 

II. ii. 70, 71. And we are left, as scorpions ringed with fire. 

What should we do but strike ourselves to death ? 
V. ii. 170, 171. Let tortures strain the truth till it be white 

As snow thrice-sifted by the frozen wind. 
V. iv. 138, 139. Kiss those warm lips before their crimson leaves 

Are blighted . . . white . . . cold. 

And if a true dramatic criticism would expunge even these 
brief figures, one shudders to think how many lines would 

1 1, i. 39 out of 147 lines; II. ii. 52 out of 161 lines; V. ii. 62 out of 195 
lines; V. iv. 66 out of 165 lines. 



84 

necessarily be pruned from our finest Elizabethan plays by a 
no more severe judgment. 

Furthermore, the imagery in " The Cenci " is expressed with 
admirable brevity. In only three instances is a single figure 
carried over more than three lines, and usually not more than 
one line is directly involved. It is usually not the explicit 
simile or metaphor that is employed, but the less obtrusive and 
more dramatically suitable trope. In this way, Shelley's fancy, 
one of the most copious in our literature, expressed itself in 
" The Cenci " with a chastened restraint that elevated, without 
impeding the style. A few conventional phrases are, indeed, 
occasionally employed, but these are more than counterbalanced 
by the instances of beautifully significant imagery which seem 
to flash a sudden light of illumination over the illustrated 
thought. I give in illustration some lines from one of Orsino's 
soliloquies : 

II. ii. 132-147. There is no escape . . . 

Her bright form kneels beside me at the altar, 

And follows me to the resort of men, 

And fills my slumber with tumultous dreams, 

So when I wake my blood seems liquid fire 

And. if I strike my damp and dizzy head 

My hot palm scorches it : her very name, 

But spoken by a stranger, makes my heart 

Sicken and pant ; and thus unprofitably 

/ clasp the phantom of unfelt delights 

Till weak imagination half possesses 

The self-created shadow. Yet much longer 

Will I not nurse this life of feverous hours: 

From the unravelled hopes of Giacomo 

I must work out my own dear purposes. 

/ see, as from a tower, the end of all : 

The general characteristics of Shelley's imagination appear, 
also, in his epithets. In most cases these are emotional, but 
not vividly sensuous. And even when both sensuous and emo- 
tional, the radiance of his finest epithets pales if brought 
into comparison with the impassioned glow in the chosen adjec- 
tives of Keats or Milton. On the other hand, Shelley's epithets 
are never so commonplace as many of Wordsworth's nor so 
sentimental as many of Coleridge's. If less brilliantly pictur- 



85 

esque than the adjectives of Byron, they have a far wider intel- 
lectual significance. That tendency to combine the subtly intel- 
lectual and the keenly emotional, which formed the peculiar 
characteristic of Shelley's imagination, is clearly seen in the 
epithets of " The Cenci " ; for example : 

V.iii. 40-41. Shall the light multitude 

Fling, at their choice curses, or faded pity, 
V. iv. 59. The wide, grey, lampless, deep, unpeopled world 

Whatever be the final judgment as to the imaginative and 
poetic quality of the diction in " The Cenci," Shelley's success 
in attaining a realistic style is not likely to be denied. Words- 
worth's general theory of diction, to which Shelley gave alle- 
giance in his preface, was put into practise without any of the 
disastrous results too often achieved by Wordsworth himself. 
While the vast majority of the words in " The Cenci " are 
those of ordinary conversation, rarely does there occur any 
suggestion of the trivial or the banal. 

On the other hand, while realistic, the style does not adhere 
absolutely to the " familiar language of men." There abound 
in " The Cenci " the time honored poetic abbreviations such as 
o'er, ere, wert, 'twill, 'twere, 'Huas, 'tis, scarce; a few other 
words from the conventional poetic vocabulary also occur, such 
as ye, prithee, aye, aught, naught, none else, y ester night, 
yester evening, overburthened, blazoned. Poetic constructions 
occasionally appear, as in did thirst, and knew not aught, and 
Shelley throughout is fond of utilizing the poet's privilege of 
accenting final ed, as in accursed, aged, loathed, winged, armed, 
veined. 

Like Keats, Shelley was fond of inventing unusual and strik- 
ing compound words. While on the whole inferior to his 
rival in the felicity with which he did this, he creates some 
compounds of memorable value : 

II. ii. no. Such self-anatomy shall teach the will 

III. ii. 3-5. If so the shaft 

Of mercy-winged lightning would not fall 
On stones and trees. 

IV. i. 104, 105. With what but with a father's curse doth God 

Panic-strike armed victory, 



Shelley's favorite negative suffix " less " is not so ubiquitous 
in " The Cenci " as in many of his works, although it appears 
in such unusual combinations as shelterless, and parentless. 
Like Milton, Shelley delights in Latin words with the negative 
prefix " un," such as unex postulating, undistingnishable , un- 
shrived and unforgiven, unimaginable, unpolluted, unutterable , 
unreplenished. The influence of his classical scholarship ap- 
pears not infrequently in Latin words that are used according 
to their root meanings, in senses slightly differing from the 
normal English denotation: 

III. ii. 64 Degraded from his post? And Marzio, 

IV. i. 36. If God, to punish his enormous crimes 

V. iv. 122. Even till the heart is vacant and despairs, 

A few curious superlatives in " est " are created by Shelley to 
avoid the more cumbrous customary forms : such are selcctest, 
justest, serenest, rightfulest. 

On the whole, Shelley's diction in " The Cenci " is probably 
sufficiently characteristic so that, in the contingency suggested 
by Mr. Hillard of the play's having been first discovered to-day 
in an anonymous manuscript, we should have been enabled to 
determine the author with considerable assurance. It is simple 
and perspicuous, and yet is capable of expressing a high degree 
of intellectual subtlety. Through its realism it is enabled to 
transact well the business of ordinary conversation and the 
communication of ordinary information, while through its 
tropical character it rises easily to the utterance of lofty and 
fervid passion. 

Of the larger elements of style in " The Cenci," perhaps the 
most noticeable is perfect clearness. This quality is, of course, 
of especial importance in any dramatic composition designed 
for the stage, yet few dramatic writers have attained, even 
after many attempts, the degree of success that Shelley reached, 
apparently almost without effort, in this, his maiden drama. 
With the exception of the contemporary reviewers, it may be 
doubted if anyone of maturity and education has ever read 
" The Cenci " without being able to understand the literal 
meaning of every passage. 



87 

This is due in part to the brevity and simplicity of the sen- 
tence structure. Whereas in the " Prometheus Unbound " 
sentences of more than ten lines are common, and not a few of 
more than twenty lines occur, 1 in " The Cenci " the former are 
unusual, and there is only one example of the latter. 2 The 
average sentence length in " The Cenci " is only between two 
and three lines. So, too, the structure is usually simple, or if 
complex, is of the loose type, unfolding its meaning with each 
clause. The involved periodic sentence, of which Shelley showed 
full command in " Alastor " and " Prometheus Unbound," is 
rarely used in " The Cenci," its occurrence being normally 
restricted to the more declamatory passages. Noticeable in- 
versions, ellipses, parentheses, and anacoloutha are generally 
entirely avoided. In this way, although Shelley's style sac- 
rificed an element of variety, it gained an unusual and almost 
transparent lucidity. 

But the sentence structure of " The Cenci " is also highly 
rhetorical in character. Shelley's youthful fondness for dia- 
lectic and argument had led him to an acquaintance with the 
formal elements of oratorical style as early as " Queen Mab." 
In that poem the exclamatory sentences, rhetorical questions, 
and emphatic repetitions are used so baldly and with such 
insufficient weight of subject-matter that they sometimes seem 
bombastic enough. Yet even here the oratorical ability of the 
boy author is plain, and his periods often move us through 
sheer skilful phrasing, despite their exaggerated content. From 
the time of " Queen Mab " until the composition of " The 
Cenci," however, Shelley devoted himself mainly to the devel- 
opment of a more purely poetic style, and his natural tendency 
towards declamation remained unexercised, save for a few pas- 
sages in " The Revolt of Islam " and " Prometheus Unbound." 

In " The Cenci " Shelley's eloquence reappears on a far 
higher level than in " Queen Mab." The situations in the 

1 It should be borne in mind, however, that Shelley, like the other 
Romanticists, and like Milton, employed the colon and semicolon more 
freely than present usage would permit, so that many of these sentences 
would be subdivided if written today. 

2 Beatrice's description of the ravine, III. i. 243-66. This long sentence 
is broken by semicolons. 



drama furnish a content that justifies such vigorous and em- 
phatic speeches of rebuke, appeal, command, scorn, and despair, 
that we are in no danger of receiving the impression of a style 
inflated beyond the emotion that it is designed to convey. 
The means of eloquence are in the main handled by Shelley 
with a temperance that prevents monotony, and that gives to 
each speech its due weight of importance. 

The specific means used by him are the customary stylistic 
devices for obtaining emphasis. Among them, Shelley's favorite 
is the cumulative repetition of phrase construction ; he uses 
this as frequently as he dares, and often with fine rhetorical 
effect. One example must suffice : 

V.ii. 145-53- 

Think, I adjure you, what it is to slay 
The reverence living in the minds of men 
Towards our ancient house, and stainless fame. 
Think what it is to strangle infant pity, 
Cradled in the belief of guileless looks, 
Till it become a crime to suffer. Think 
What 'tis to blot with infamy and blood 
All that which shows like innocence, and is, 
Hear me, great God ! I swear, most innocent, 1 

That more open instrument of eloquence, the rhetorical ques- 
tion, needs to be used with more caution, and once in a while 
Shelley over-uses it. Thus, for example, the accusatory speech 
of Cenci, in the first scene of the second act, is one continuous 
stream of rhetorical questions, powerful at first, but monoto- 
nous before we reach the end. Occasionally, also, Shelley em- 
ploys the device in an unnatural and artificial manner, as at 
the beginning of Beatrice's speech at the banquet (I. iii. ioo- 
108), where its occurrence suggests an amount of forensic 
control untrue to the spirit of the scene. Usually, however, in 
" The Cenci," its appearance is unobtrusive, yet most effective, 
and Shelley sometimes obtains by its means a dramatic expres- 
sion of high persuasiveness : 2 

1 Other noticeable instances of this use of repetition are : I. iii. 30-34, 
111-131, 132-37; II. i- 63-73, 89-94; II. ii. 76-82, 133-36; III. i. 108-m, 
172-77, 184-93, 218-222, 289-96; III. ii. 18-24, 54-58; IV. i. 91-94, 115- 
18; IV. iv. 177-87; V. ii. 140-44; V. iii. 70-76; V. iv. 101-108. 

2 V. iv. 68-75. Additional examples of the rhetorical question : II. i. 
130-48, 151-56, 181-84; IV. i. 3-9; V. iii. 28-45. 



For was he not alone omnipotent 
On Earth, and ever present? Even tho' dead, 
Does not his spirit live in all that breathe, 
And work for me and mine still the same ruin, 
Scorn, pain, despair ? Who ever yet returned 
To teach the laws of death's untrodden realm? 
Unjust perhaps as those which drive us now, 
O, whither, whither? 

The employment of the usually rather artificial figure of 
apostrophe was rendered peculiarly natural and easy for Shelley 
by his normal tendency toward personification. This tendency 
runs through all his poetry from the opening line of " Queen 
Mab " to the conclusion of the " Triumph of Life." Shelley's 
monistic philosophy, his love of nature, his passionate aspira- 
tion after the ideal, all led to his regarding every thought or 
object in the universe as possessed of a personality equal to 
that of his own being. Thus throughout his poetry abstract 
ideas and natural phenomena mingle with the poet's self in one 
interrelated brotherhood. It is not strange, therefore, that in 
his hands the figure of apostrophe loses all appearance of affec- 
tation, and becomes thoroughly spontaneous. Usually, in 
"The Cenci," it occurs in sudden waves of impassioned feel- 
ing, as in Beatrice's exclamation, just before Cenci's death, 
when she herself snatches up a dagger to slay him :* 

IV. Hi. 31-32. Hadst thou a tongue to say 

She murdered her own father, I must do it ! 

But there also occur more elaborate instances. Of these prob- 
ably the most powerful is that in Cenci's curse upon Beatrice : 2 

IV. i. 128-36. 

Earth, in the name of God, let her food be 

Poison, until she be encrusted round 

With leprous stains ! Heaven, rain upon her head 

The blistering drops of the Maremma's dew, 

Till she be speckled like a toad; parch up 

Those love-enkindled lips, warp those fine limbs 

To loathed lameness ! All beholding sun, 

Strike in thine envy those life-darting eyes 

With thine own blinding beams ! 

1 Additional instances of brief apostrophe: III. i. 117-18, 177-79 1 IV. i. 
177-80, 183-85. 

2 Additional instances of elaborate apostrophe: I. iii. 77-89; HI. ii. 8-15. 



90 

Exclamation is another figure whose use requires discretion.^ 
In its employment Shelley is not always happy in his choice of 
phrases, which sometimes seem unnatural and affected. Such 
exclamations, for example, as Beatrice's " O, world ! O, life ! 

0, day! O, misery!" (III. i. 32), Lucretia's " O, terror! O, 
despair!" (IV. iv. 19), or Bernardo's " O, life! O, world!" 
(V. iv. 128), belong to the language of the stage instead of to 
that of real life. Far more frequent and successful is Shelley's 
use of the normal declarative sentence in an exclamatory man- 
ner to express sudden outbursts of feeling. The most note- 
worthy instance is afforded at the beginning of the third act 
by the speech of Beatrice, which is one succession of exclama- 
tions of horror, the bewildered expression of a tortured mind, 
unable to do more than report its impressions without power to 
coordinate them into thought. I need quote only a part of 
the passage in illustration r 1 

III. i. 8-15. 

The pavement sinks under my feet ! The walls 
Spin round ! I see a woman weeping there, 
And standing calm and motionless, whilst I 
Slide giddily as the world reels. . . . My God ! 
The beautiful blue heaven is flecked with blood ! 
The sunshine on the floor is black ! The air 
Is changed to vapours such as the dead breathe 
In charnel pits ! 

The two most pronouncedly intellectual of rhetorical figures 
are antithesis and irony. Of these, the former is rarely used 
by Shelley. His temperament was the reverse of epigram- 
matic, and his emotional, expansive utterance could hardly find 
congenial the rigid limits of the balanced structure. Never- 
theless, this did not altogether lie outside of his range, as the 
not infelicitous, if infrequent, instances in " The Cenci " bear 
witness : 2 

III. i. 282-8. We 

Are now no more, as once, parent and child, 
But man to man ; the oppressor to the oppressed ; 

1 Other instances of an eloquent use of this exclamatory sentence are : 

1. iii. 137-41 ; HI. i. 365-73. 

2 Additional instances of antithesis: III. i. 200-3, 387-90; V. ii. 132-5. 



91 

The slanderer to the slandered ; foe to foe : 
He has cast nature off, which was his shield, 
And nature casts him off, who is her shame ; 
And I spurn both. 

Instances of irony are more numerous. Quite devoid of 
humor as he was, and all too serious by nature, Shelley never- 
theless possessed no inconsiderable fund of wit, as is evidenced 
in parts of " Peter Bell the Third " and " Swellfoot the Tyrant," 
where, as in " The Cenci," it takes the form of irony. Shelley 
had a natural command of this delicate weapon whose use he 
never developed as he might have done. In " The Cenci " it is 
employed with varying degrees of subtlety, ranging from the 
open and repeated sneers of Cenci 1 to the suppressed but 
piercing bitterness of Beatrice in such lines as these : 2 

I. iii. 124-25. Ye may soon share such merriment again 

As fathers make over their children's graves. 

V. iv. 109-12. No, Mother, we must die : 

Since such is the reward of innocent lives ; 
Such the alleviation of worst wrongs. 

In all these various ways, Shelley has developed in " The 
Cenci " a style that in its frequent pointedness and almost con- 
tinual emphasis is thoroughly dramatic. In these respects it 
differs remarkably from his normal poetic style, and offers a 
proof of rhetorical versatility not elsewhere seen so clearly in 
his work. 

Does " The Cenci," however, possess the supreme dramatic 
quality of style — concision? In that case, it would not only 
differ from the work of Shelley's English contemporaries, none 
of whom was able to boast of this gift in any high degree, but 
it would differ preeminently from all the other long poems of 
Shelley himself. But " The Cenci " forms in this respect no 
real exception to the general type of his work. While never 
unpleasantly diffuse, nor so copious in words as to hinder the 
thought, Shelley is very far from expressing his ideas in the 
briefest manner possible. His tendency in " The Cenci," as 
elsewhere, is always towards amplification. Although his cus- 

1 II. i. 130-48. 

2 Additional instances of irony: I. i. 27-33; !• *"• 4~i4> 139-41 ." HI. i. 
72-73, 203-06. 



92 

tomary amplification by means of elaborate imagery is, as we 
have seen, carefully avoided in "The Cenci," expansion by 
synonyms or synonymous phrases is constantly employed. 
Thus we find Giacomo, when he learns of Beatrice's demands 
for Cenci's murder, saying: 

III. i. 362-5. My doubts are well appeased ; 

There is a higher reason for the act 
Than mine; there is a holier judge than me, 1 
A more unblamed avenger. 

No doubt there is emphasis here, and eloquence. There is 
also a subtle variation of the idea, while it is enforced by the 
repetition. Nevertheless we feel that Shelley is playing with 
the expressional possibilities of Giacomo's emotion, instead of 
giving us the very heart of it. If it be answered that the weak 
Giacomo would probably have spoken thus, what shall we say 
to the following speech of Beatrice herself? 

III. i. 107-13. 

What are the words which you would have me speak? 

I, who can feign no image in my mind 

Of that which has transformed me : I whose thought 

Is like a ghost shrouded and folded up 

In its own formless horror : of all words, 

That minister to mortal intercourse , 

Which wouldst thou hear? 

This passage is typical of the whole drama. The dialogue 
in general is expressed with a lyric amplitude of emotional 
detail ; each feeling is dwelt upon and drawn out so that every 
shade of its significance may be made plain. Shelley dares 
not trust himself to a single terse utterance, lest it should not 
do justice to his subject. He is unwilling to merge the minor 
accompanying elements of an experience in its one funda- 
mental feeling. His style cuts to the bone, but it does not stab 
to the heart. It lacks the inevitableness of Shakespere, it lacks 
the terrible intensity of Webster. It is a style of valiant ex- 
perimentation rather than one of assured finality. 

Yet exceptional cases of supreme mastery occur. Such are 

1 This seems to be an instance like several others which have been 
pointed out in Shelley's poetry, where the poet's sense of melody — in this 
case alliteration in m — has taken precedence over his regard for grammar. 



93 

the universally admired last speech of Beatrice, portions of the 
preceding prison scene, and parts of the two scenes connected 
with the murder. These passages are truly final. 

Throughout the entire play all but the highest dramatic style 
is actually attained. Shelley shows a lucidity not only superior 
to that of his rivals in the nineteenth century, save Byron and 
Tennyson, but also superior to that of many of the greatest 
Elizabethan playwrights. He shows a directness and force 
which is wholly the reverse of the languid style of his narrative 
poems, and is a testimony of remarkable ability to control style 
according to the end in view. Finally, the passions and suffer- 
ings of Shelley's characters find utterance in passages of lofty 
declamation that correspond in the realm of eloquence to his 
flights of lyric ecstacy in the realm of pure poetry. This decla- 
mation is fluent, copious, and well adapted to dramatic needs : 
now impassioned and fiery, now intellectual and ironical, soar- 
ing in moods of courage, faltering in moods of pathos ; and 
whatever the situation, always throbbing and pulsing with dra- 
matic feeling. 

Note on the Rhythm 

The rhythm of " The Cenci " shows less marked adaptation 
to dramatic needs than do the diction and phrasing. In gen- 
eral the metrical flow is smooth, even, and continuous. Out of 
the total two thousand and thirty lines of blank verse there 
are only nine which are fragmentary or syllabically defec- 
tive. 1 Although Rossetti would emend most of these in the 
interest of regularity, I am convinced that in each instance 
there is in the original version some direct adaptation to the 
sense which is lost by alteration. All the cases occur in rapid, 
interrupted, or informal conversation, and contain partial met- 
rical compensation by pauses or by unusually strong accents. 
Of hypermetrical lines there are only three, — two Alexandrines 
and one thirteen-syllable line, each of which is divided among 
different speakers, and in its irregularity is in keeping with the 
phrases of confused or impassioned exclamation that it bears. 2 

1 1, i. 123, 125 ; III. i. 59, 270 ; IV. i. 136 ; IV. ii. 17 ; IV. iii. 4 ; IV. iv. 3 ; 
V. ii. 19. 

2 1, iii. 70; IV. iii. 8; V. iv. 157. 



94 

Shelley avails himself frequently of the feminine ending in the 
more conversational and intellectual speeches, but avoids it in 
higher emotional and poetic utterance. The list of its propor- 
tionate appearance in the lines of all the important characters 
makes this plain : Judge, 25 per cent. ; Savella, 20 per cent. ; 
Camillo, 18 per cent.; Olimpio, 16 per cent; Marzio, 15 per 
cent. ; Orsino, 14 per cent. ; Cenci, 14 per cent. ; Bernardo, 14 
per cent. ; Giacomo, 1 1 per cent. ; Lucretia, 1 1 per cent. ; 
Beatrice, 9 per cent. 

Irregularity in the number and placing of the accents is 
much greater than in the case of the syllables, but it is hardly 
greater in " The Cenci " than in the rest of Shelley's poetry or 
than, indeed, in most non-dramatic English blank verse. In 
the more impassioned passages, however, by employing spon- 
daic substitution, he sometimes produces very strong, unyield- 
ing, dramatic lines. 1 

In " The Cenci," as elsewhere, Shelley, like Tennyson, pre- 
fers the pause after the even syllables, in contrast to Brown- 
ing, who so delights in dividing the regular metrical foot. In 
the extent to which he makes use of the pause Shelley's practice 
in his different works varies greatly. His early poems, " Queen 
Mab " and " Alastor," tend to neglect the pause, both at the 
end of the line and within it. In the " Prometheus Unbound " 
the pauses are heavier and more frequent, producing a less 
flowing but weightier rhythm. The first two acts of " The 
Cenci " reveal a distinctively line rhythm, end-stopped with no 
internal pause. The lack of this internal pause makes the 
rhythm less forceful than that of " Prometheus Unbound " ; 
the lack of enjambement makes it less flexible than that of 
" Alastor." The succession of caesuraless end-stopped lines 
not infrequently becomes monotonous. It should be noticed, 
however, that this type of line is chiefly used by Orsino and 
Cenci, in whose speeches its regularity well expresses cold 
deliberation and perfect self-control ; therefore what is lost in 
pure poetic beauty is atoned for in these instances by increased 
characterization. With the beginning of the third act there 
comes a change in the rhythm coincident with the heightened 

•III. i. 157; HI. ii. 24; IV. ii. 38; V. iv. 67, 79, "8. 



95 

emotional content of the drama. Feminine endings and the 
line without marked internal pause decrease greatly, and the 
proportion of enjambements increases accordingly ; thus a far 
more irregular, powerful, and flexible rhythm is attained. This 
phrasal rhythm, in striking contrast to the line rhythm of the 
earlier part, governs the last three acts of the play. 

Shelley's command of melody, in which he is perhaps pre- 
eminent among English poets, does not forsake him in " The 
Cenci." Alliteration, 1 transverse alliteration, 2 internal conso- 
nant repetition, 3 assonance, 4 assonance and alliteration com- 
bined, 5 all are used repeatedly and with the ease of a master. 
The amount of these melodic devices in the various scenes de- 
pends upon the emotional intensity of the situation : thus, for 
example, we find the greatest amount of alliteration in the 
murder scenes, and in the scene immediately after Count Cenci's 
violation of Beatrice. But on the whole the melody, like the 
meter, is not peculiarly dramatic ; both are simply dramatically 
adequate, and their real merit is the merit of beautiful verse 
in itself. 

1 E. g., I. iii. 101-07, 138-40; III. i. 13-17, 90-98; V. iv. 16-18. 

2 E. g., I. i. 78 ; HI. i. 209. 

3 E. g., I. ii. 5-7; HI. i. 12; V. iii. 124; V. iv. 35-38, 64, 144. 

4 E. g., I. i. 12, 23; I. ii. 10, 57, 88; V. iv. 32, 107. 

5 V. ii. 144 ; V. iv. 52. 



IX 

Final Significance 

The dramatic form is usually held to offer the very slightest 
of opportunities for acquaintance with an author's personality. 
It is asserted that the drama is a mask behind which the drama- 
tist works, creating characters who may or may not be like 
himself, expressing thoughts and emotions which may or may 
not be his own, but affording us no safe criterion by which to 
distinguish between personal and impersonal elements. Yet, 
from another point of view, the paradox might be maintained 
that the drama, instead of being the one artistic form that most 
conceals the author's personality, is rather the one form that 
best reveals it. For the drama, more than any other type, 
makes plain the depth and saneness of the author's understand- 
ing of humanity, the real value of his " criticism of life," and 
the ultimate comprehensiveness of his character. It reveals 
his personality in the richness or poverty of his experience, and 
the breadth or limitation of his outlook upon life. 

In this respect, none of the technical requirements of the 
drama are without a larger importance. The successful mod- 
ern dramatist must be democratic enough to know thoroughly 
his popular audience, composed of all social classes as it is, and 
to understand how it will be affected by this or that element in 
his play; he must be practical enough to overcome the specific 
difficulties involved in stage presentation ; he must be imagina- 
tive enough to create mentally a small world of realistic human 
beings and to guide their lives to a predestined end. He must 
be able equally to handle events, to reveal the inner lives of his 
characters, and to depict their outer lives entangled in such 
complex situations of mutual relationship as those which occur 
in actual society. 

If we have all these requirements in mind, when we are con- 
fronted with the work of almost any dramatist, it is probable 
96 



97 

that at first we shall be conscious chiefly of its limitations. 
This is abundantly true in the case of " The Cenci." 

At the very outset it is evident that Shelley did not know his 
audience. This was not necessitated by the fact that he was 
partially antagonistic toward it: Byron and Ibsen, to name no 
others, were nineteenth century writers even more antagonistic 
toward their audience, who yet were able to conquer it and 
compel its homage, because they understood it better than it 
understood itself. Shelley had none of this clairvoyant under- 
standing. He deliberately selected for stage representation a 
subject that could not by any possibility have become popular 
in the theaters of his own time, and did this without at all 
comprehending the absoluteness of the inhibition. Because 
such a subject would have been tolerated by what he, perhaps 
rightly, considered the more manly Elizabethan audience, he 
deemed it possible that it might be accepted by that of his own 
day. Herein he showed his usual complete misconception of 
the power of contemporary ideas of propriety. 

This temperamental failure to realize the force of existing 
circumstances appears also in the numerous technical defects 
that unfit " The Cenci " for stage representation. Because 
Shelley found pure character scenes and long speeches of dec- 
lamation in the Greek drama, he therefore introduced them in 
a modern play, written to meet an entirely different set of 
conditions. 

When we come to the imaginative aspects of his work we 
find a more curious situation. On the one hand, Shelley has 
failed to grasp the surface requirements of the drama, re- 
quirements that many lesser men have been able to master with 
ease. It is initially apparent that the dramatist should be able 
to tell a story concisely and rapidly, yet this narrative require- 
ment lies quite beyond Shelley's ability. He cannot develop 
his plot connectedly ; the supreme scenes he shows us, but the 
intermediate links are lacking. 

On the other hand, in the far more difficult task of charac- 
terization, he meets with success. The convincingness and 
moving pathos in the character of Beatrice, and the fearful 
power in that of Cenci must be admitted. The minor charac- 
8 



98 

ters are in the main adequate ; their characterization may be 
thin, but on the whole it is not unreal. Furthermore, the char- 
acters in " The Cenci " are truly interrelated as the characters 
of a drama should be. They remain in our memory not as 
isolated figures, but as parts of a complicated nexus of human 
life. The influence of Cenci upon the other characters, and 
the influence of Beatrice upon them, the relations of Cenci with 
the Church, the affection between Beatrice and her brothers, 
the ambition and treachery of Orsino, are all worked out 
clearly, and combined in the fundamental situation that domi- 
nates the play. The emotional intensity of this terrible funda- 
mental situation, as Shelley has been able to bring it home to 
our consciousness, reveals a genuine and deep dramatic power 
in the play. This power is not revealed continuously in a log- 
ical development of the situation, but it is shown abundantly 
in all the pivotal scenes. 

Thus, while Shelley is weak in handling the elements of dra- 
matic plot, he proves able to create definite characters and to 
reveal a tragic entanglement by means of powerful individual 
scenes. Does this justify us in assuming, with Mrs. Shelley, 
Leigh Hunt and others, that he would ever have become one 
of the world's greatest dramatists? Such a question of mere 
possibility, incapable of proof as it is, may seem at first sight 
rather barren, but it is really of great importance in relation 
to the main question as to the nature of Shelley's genius. 

Unfortunately, there are two clear facts that militate against 
the view that Shelley's personality was large enough to fill this 
role which his extreme admirers claim for him. The first is 
that the characterization in the play is not genuinely objective. 
In " The Cenci " Shelley chanced upon a theme that superbly 
illustrated his special theory of life, and the characters corre- 
spond to types of humanity continually present in his mind. 
Tyrants, heroes, and slaves made up his world, a world which, 
while true enough to certain aspects of real life, was very inade- 
quate as a representation of the whole. We have no sufficient 
reason to believe that he would ever have worked himself 
entirely free from this hampering theory. The same types 
reappear in his later dramas of " Hellas " and " Charles I," and 



would probably have continued to characterize his work. The 
general subjectivity of Shelley has been less dwelt upon by 
critics than that of Byron, but it was no less prominent, though 
with the difference that while Byron was chiefly interested in 
his own concrete personality, Shelley was interested in his own 
abstract convictions. The artistic limitation, however, prob- 
ably was, and would have continued to be, about equal in each 
case. From Byron we could hardly have expected plays which 
would not have been dominated by his own type of character ; 
from Shelley we should not have been likely to receive plays 
which would have been free from connection with his narrow 
social theories. 

The second fact which makes against the belief in great 
dramatic potentiality on the part of Shelley is his almost total 
lack of development in this respect between 1819 and his death 
in 1822. During the first two of those three years he made no 
further attempt in drama — for the two act burlesque of " Swell- 
foot the Tyrant " in 1820 can hardly be considered such — and 
when in 1821 he wrote " Hellas " it was to a half lyrical form, 
like that in the "Prometheus Unbound," that he returned. 
After deciding to write a stage tragedy upon the subject of 
Charles I, he allowed more than a year to pass before begin- 
ning it. Then having worked upon the new play for the better 
part of the winter of 1821-22, without having been able to 
finish even the first act, he cast it aside in order to devote him- 
self to a lyrical drama on the subject of an Indian enchantress. 
This in turn he abandoned for the still more lyrical narra- 
tive of the " Triumph of Life." The five existing scenes of 
" Charles I " show that Shelley had formed no unified concep- 
tion even of the first act: they bear little resemblance to the 
parts of a drama, and are merely interesting studies of succes- 
sive groups of characters. 

In this respect it is interesting to contrast Shelley with two 
of his rivals in the romantic drama. Byron, in less time than 
that between " The Cenci " and " Charles I," passed from the 
dramatically impossible, if poetically successful, " Marino Fa- 
liero " to the dramatically successful, if poetically impossible, 
"Werner." Keats's " Otho the Great" is not more in- 

Lorc 



100 

ferior to Shelley's " Cenci," than is Shelley's " Charles I " to 
Keats's " King Stephen." This is significant of the trend of 
development in these three poets. To assert absolutely, how- 
ever, that any one of them was superior in dramatic power to 
either of the other two would be disputable. Keats undoubt- 
edly possessed a more objective temperament than either of the 
others, but he nowhere shows a pronounced interest in 
struggles of the will, and these form the very web and woof 
of drama. Byron was interested in struggles of the will, but 
his dominating personality lacked the sympathy essential to a 
dramatist. Shelley possessed abundant sympathy, but was 
deficient in any broad knowledge of humanity. No one of 
them would ever have made a dramatist of the first rank, but 
each of them might possibly under the most favorable circum- 
stances have become a great playwright of the second rank, of 
the class, perhaps, of Victor Hugo, or of Schiller. 

Although I cannot subscribe to the claims that have been 
made for " The Cenci " by Shelley's more ardent admirers, I 
find in it evidence of certain qualities that have been vigorously 
denied to his genius by those critics who have insisted that his 
ability was exclusively lyric. Most important of these is sus- 
tained power, or something more nearly to be called by that 
name than anything among the works of Shelley's lyric rivals, 
Burns, Coleridge, and Keats. The unsatisfactory plot struc- 
ture of " The Cenci " was due rather to Shelley's inability to 
master the details of dramatic form than to a falling off, at 
any point, in his creative impulse. The characterization of the 
two great protagonists is maintained on the same high level 
throughout, the rhythm of the blank verse is more highly 
mastered in the latter half of the play, and the dramatic style 
reaches its supreme excellence in the very last scene. While 
" The Cenci " probably originated in a lyric impulse, — the im- 
pulse to give expression to the sufferings of the pathetic face 
that looked out upon Shelley from Guido's picture, — neverthe- 
less a lyric impulse that can adapt itself to a dramatic situation, 
inspire the utterances of two diametrically opposed characters, 
and prolong itself without diminution through the length of 
five acts, bears close resemblance to what we ordinarily mean 
by sustained poetic power. 



101 

" The Cenci " shows, also, unusual artistic self-control. So 
far as his knowledge of the drama extended, Shelley bent his 
nature to meet the special requirements of the work he had in 
hand. The flights of fancy naturally so dear to him were ruth- 
lessly excluded ; the aims of Philosophy and Philanthropy, 
while influencing his conception of the main situation, were 
never allowed to determine individual speeches ; and the char- 
acters were not permitted to wander off in their thoughts to 
the more pleasing realms of imagination, but were compelled 
to adapt themselves to the grimly realistic situation in which 
they were placed. 

Lastly, keen intellectual power is made evident. This quality 
has been often denied to Shelley ; and yet I do not see how 
any one can read " The Cenci " without feeling it in almost 
every line. Shelley's grasp of the significance of his main 
situation, his insight into the psychology of his chief charac- 
ters, the lucidity of his style and the subtlety of its abounding 
tropes, all are indicative of intellectual power. A man who 
could write over two thousand lines of absolutely clear dra- 
matic verse was not the vague and incoherent dreamer that 
hostile critics of Shelley would have us see in him. 

" The Cenci " appears in the most favorable light when it is 
considered in connection with the school of English literary 
drama to which in virtue both of its chronology and of its 
characteristics it belongs. Shelley did only what the other 
closet dramatists were trying to do, but he did it much better. 
They all were subjective, self-conscious, and intellectual poets 
who made these personal characteristics the leading qualities 
of their dramas. Their subjectivity appears in the length of 
the speeches, the constant crowding in of lyrical elements, and 
the emphasis upon pathos; their self-consciousness appears in 
the introspective heroes and villains who throng their plays ; 
their intellectuality appears in the choice of subtle themes of 
general abstract moral interest. 

In the first place, " The Cenci," like the rest, deals with 
themes of abstract moral interest, — the duty to annihilate wick- 
edness regardless of formal ties, and the coexistence of inward 
righteousness with outward criminality. But these themes, 



102 

fortunately, were more fundamental and universal than those 
which the other closet dramatists succeeded in presenting. 

The same peculiar success attended Shelley's creation of 
character. None of the other self-conscious villains in the 
English romantic drama attained the realism of Count Cenci, 
who is their best representative. His colleagues are always a 
little ridiculous in their parade of wickedness, too extravagant 
for such mere shadows ; he alone is no shadow, but a living 
being, not to be trifled with, ominous, deadly. The others we 
can laugh off the stage ; Count Cenci is a protagonist who will 
remain. So also with Shelley's heroine in relation to her rivals 
in the closet drama. Who remembers now the vaguely out- 
lined Idonea, Dona Theresa, Glycina, Auranthe, and the rest? 
But Beatrice Cenci appeals to us as a flesh and blood woman 
whose purity of soul, ascendancy of intellect, and intensity of 
suffering make her at once an object of true admiration and 
deep compassion. 

From this success in characterization there results one great 
dramatic difference between " The Cenci " and all the other 
plays of the romantic school with the exception of Byron's. 
These others, whether actually performed on the stage, like 
the plays of Lewis, Sheil, and Maturin, or confined to the 
closet like " The Borderers " and " Zapolya," all were essen- 
tially melodramas, not tragedies. That is to say, in them the 
action is palpably governed by the will of the author, to whose 
predetermined arrangement of the play the realism of the char- 
acters is sacrificed. In " The Cenci," on the other hand, it is 
the plot which is sacrificed to the characters, and this, if also 
a defect, is yet a far nobler one, for it lies on the side of 
tragedy. Such action as there is in " The Cenci " depends 
upon the characters, and is the result of the forces of their 
warring natures, not of the author's interpolating hand, intent 
upon the proper outcome of his story. 

Finally, in another important respect Shelley did what his 
contemporary rivals of the closet drama were trying to do, and 
did it better. They all were great poets, and in their dramas 
they strove primarily to produce verse which should endure 
as great literature. In this regard Shelley succeeded far better 



103 

than any of the others. I think it might even be successfully 
maintained that of all the English poets of the nineteenth cen- 
tury who essayed drama, Shelley was able to create the most 
powerful dramatic style, and the most adequate dramatic blank 
verse. The best line of " The Borderers " is hardly better than 
the worst line of " The Cenci " ; a few passages in Coleridge 
are more sonorous than anything in Shelley, but most of 
Coleridge's dramatic verse is far too flaccid and sentimental to 
stand comparison with the direct earnestness of " The Cenci " ; 
Keats's dramatic style is too luscious, and lacks the realism of 
Shelley's ; Byron's is more vigorous, but unmelodious and un- 
rhythmical ; Browning's is more intense, but less natural, and 
less lucid ; Tennyson's is as lucid, but less vigorous, and less 
eloquent. In every case the balance seems to incline towards 
Shelley. 

In spite of its defects, " The Cenci " remains a great work 
of art. Although Shelley failed, through ignorance and in- 
capacity, in his initial purpose of writing a play suitable for the 
stage, he succeeded, through his deep emotional and imagina- 
tive sympathy with his subject, in writing a dramatic poem 
which must take rank among the chief English literary works 
of his era. 



E COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 

STUDIES IN ENGLISH 

Joseph Glanvill 
A Siudy in English Thought and Letters of the Seventeenth 
Century 

By FERRIS GREENSLET 

Cloth, l2mo pp. xi -)- 235 $l-5o net 

The Elizabethan Lyric 

By JOHN ERSKINE 
Cloth, l2mo pp. xvi -f 344 $1.50 net 

Classical Echoes in Tennyson 

By WILFRED P. MUSTARD 

Cloth, l2mo pp. xvi -f- 164 Jpi.25 net 

Outlines of the Literary History of Colonial 
Pennsylvania 

By M. KATHERINE JACKSON 

Cloth, 8vo pp. vii + 177 $1.25 net 

Byron and Byronism in America 

By WILLIAM ELLERY LEONARD 

Paper, 8vo pp. vi -f- 126 $1.00 net 

Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature 

By MARGARET BALL 

Paper, 8vo pp. x + 1 88 $1.00 net 

The Early American Novel 

By LILLIE DEMING LOSHE 

Paper, 8vo pp. vii -}- 131 $1.00 net 

Studies in New England Transcendentalism 

By HAROLD C. GODDARD 

Paper, 8vo $1.00 net 

Verse Satire in England before the Renaissance 

By SAMUEL MARION TUCKER 

Paper, 8vo $1.00 net 

A Study of Shelley's Drama "The Cenci " 

By ERNEST SUTHERLAND BATES 
Paper, 8vo 1. 00 net 

The Macmillan Company, Agents, 66 Fifth Avenue, New York 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



1111 



014 457 555 6 • 



